”I think all of us have a social responsibility to resist Trump’s destructive agenda in every way we can,” artist Tom Toro told HuffPost.
For Toro, his particular brand of resistance often comes in the form of cartoons, many of which have appeared in publications like The New Yorker. Shortly after it was announced that President Donald Trump would be pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement, an international effort to combat climate change, one such cartoon began making its way across social media.
In it, two caricatures resembling Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are pictured in shoulders-deep water, marooned on an island, the former muttering: “Don’t worry ― I’m tweeting that climate change is fake.” Pence appears, hands joined in prayer, as a complicit witness.
“Humor is the heartbeat of a healthy democracy,” Toro added in our previous interview. “And, well, as we’re soon going to show our so-called president, the joke’s on him.”
Toro is far from the only artist to created scathing Trump takedowns in the form of political cartoons. Edel Rodriguez, known for his no-holds-barred covers for Der Spiegel, has been satirizing everything from Trumpcare to the U.S. president’s “America First” attitude.
This week, his DS cover features a Mar-a-Lago-ready Donald embracing his backswing as a flaming golf ball drawn as planet Earth throttles into the cartoon’s foreground. “You’re fired,” the image’s caption reads.
“My work encourages people that are a little afraid,” Rodriguez told HuffPost earlier this year. “When they see what I do, and all the stuff that comes at me, they might say, ‘Wow, that guy has some guts. Maybe I should get some too.’”
Emily Flake, another New Yorker cartoonist whose work has subtly and not-so-subtly remarked upon Trump’s presidency, has thought a lot about cartoonists’ handling of Trump’s policies and personas.
“I tried to be circumspect about when I mentioned DT by name or drew him in an attempt to keep the audience from being exhausted and the work from being too one-note,” she told HuffPost in January. “And I think that when people’s brains have just that extra nanosecond to put the idea together, it can help a joke land harder. That said, Trump has a look that just begs to be drawn ― for better or worse, he’s a gift to cartoonists, visually speaking.”
Take a look at a few more cartoons dedicated specifically to the horrors and absurdities of Trump’s stance on climate change below.
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