Our Chin Cellulite Orange Muse
On my new Trump magazine cover
Thank you so much to the dozens of monsters who have signed up since I started posting regularly on substack. As an independent artist with no degree and a giant mouth, your subscriptions help me do the work I want, unconstrained by collectors or corporations. I am truly grateful. If you like my art, you can also buy my books and prints.
Last month, In These Times asked me to do a wrap-around cover for their election issue. I knew Trump would win, and then I’d have to draw him.
Like most working illustrators, I’ve drawn Trump a lot over the last decade. My first time was in Dubai, in 2014, when I got up at a press conference for one of his golf courses and asked why his workers were paid $150 a month.
That should have been the last of it, but two years later, he got elected President.
So I drew him. Again and again. For money, yes, but also for fun. What can I say? I couldn’t help myself. It was irresistible. While Trump has the essential quality of any good cartoon character, in that you can break him down to a few lines and circles, his chin cellulite and labial eye-folds offer a garden of complexity for a Victoriana obsessed artist like myself. The man gives good grotesque.
I drew him. Every working illustrator did. And yet, each time I drew the tremulous drapes of flesh below his chin, it became a little less satisfying. It was as if we were not skewering him, so much as being used as conduits, our pens just imbuing the Trump meme with more idiot numina. It started to feel a bit hack. He’s ugly. He’s orange. He’s evil. Got it.
So by the time In These Times asked me to do their election cover, I knew it couldn’t just be a picture of Trump, especially since he was far from the only grotesque in the room.
When Trump won the popular vote, all I could think of was that froggy grin of his, morphing into a diving board for people to jump off into a pit of flaming shit.
But I couldn’t just draw Trump. This moment isn’t just his. It belongs to Joe Biden, flashing those dentures as he lied about a coming ceasefire in Gaza.
To those snickering DNC delegates who stuck their fingers in their ears to avoid hearing activists read the list of murdered Gaza kids (the fire is also the fire that consumed nineteen year old computer science student Shaban al-Dalou after Israel bombed the hospital he was recovering at in Deir el Balah, with bombs given to them by the US).
Victory has a thousand fathers. Trump, Biden, Pelosi, Harris, the American people. All of you, take your bows.
If you're sick of looking at coverboy’s face, my newest print is a good palate cleanser. I spent most of this fall illustrating Tiger Slayer, a kid’s book on Indian empress Nur Jahan with the great historian Ruby Lal (preorder here), and this noble beast escaped from my sketchbook
I’d much rather look at your drawings of his face, which have a beautiful horror, than look at his face, which is just creepy.
Brilliant visual and literary work. Veering into politics (as you said you like to debate) IMVHO ('cos I'm no expert and not even American), you're right Gaza contributed to the loss, but not as you suggest. Wearing my tinfoil hat, Gaza was timed to deliver Trump. That's what wedge issues are for—to turn off voters who might otherwise support your rival. Gaza was made into a wedge issue, where inhumanity and antisemitism became the battle standards of opposing factions. The Democrats tried to face both ways at once, but all that did was make them seem hypocritical. If you think that's too tinfoil-hatty, remember Iran and Russia are allies, and I assume you know Trump's camp has close Russian ties. Iran has already abandoned Hamas, which served its purpose of stopping an Israel-Saudi Arabian alliance, and inactivity will allow Trump to leave it alone to recover. Trump also became his own dead cat. The Democrats focused on how egregiously evil he is and made the election into an anti-Trump referendum. But, all electorates want to know what the candidates would do for them. Democrat policies were working after Trump trashed things, but the feel-good factor had yet to get through, so Trump used the space to blame the Dems, and they were too busy saying how bad he was. That's how dead catting works if you've not heard the expression—slam a dead cat on the table to make everyone talk about it, and not the difficult topic the dead cat interrupted.