July 20 marked a year and a half into the Biden administration, but you’d never know that from Garry Trudeau, the liberal hack political cartoonist behind the long-running, but highly overrated “Doonesbury” comic strip.
Although Donald Trump has been absent from the White House for 18 Months, he apparently still lives rent free in Trudeau’s home. Trudeau clearly suffers Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Trudeau—whose Sunday-only “Doonesbury” cartoon strips not surprisingly still lead The color comics section of the Trump-hating Washington Post—continues to savage the 45thPresident regularly
But not once in the 78 Sundays since Jan. 20, 2021, has he ridiculed anything President Joe Biden has said or done, despite Sleepy Joe’s countless verbal gaffes, word salads, and abject policy failures so richly deserving of lampooning.
Politicians are fair game for satire and ridicule, of course, but Trudeau’s attacks on Trump aren’t funny. They’re just relentlessly vicious and mean-spirited.
The personal attacks leveled throughout the Trump presidency have continued since “the former guy”—as Trudeau now calls him—left office on Jan. 20, 2021.
He compared Trump’s departure from White House to August 1974’s end of the presidency under Richard Nixon on Jan. 24, 1974. Trudeau also attacked Trudeau in his strip. (“Doonesbury” debuted in October 1970 as a daily comic strip and went to Sundays only in February 2014.)
But it was still a small step in comparison to the rest of what has happened since. One of the most shocking examples is:
Feb. 21, 2021: “Trump was the only candidate ever endorsed by the Taliban, the highly respected terrorist group.” (That “endorsement” was likely meant to hurt Trump rather than help him, and Trump was far tougher on the Taliban than Biden, whose precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan gifted the Taliban with $80 billion in U.S. military armaments. Trump wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.
Feb. 28, 2021: A recurring character, a career scam artist named Duke, laments that Trump had passed him over as an adviser in favor of the deposed dictator of the fictional Berzerkistan, “[a]A dictator who had rivals shot. Someone he [Trump] could look up to.”
March 7, 2021 “I wonder if authoritarians ever learn their lesson?” Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” mused after Trump’s second unwarranted impeachment. Accompanying it is an illustration of a New York Times article about Adolf Hitler’s release from a German prison in December 1924 with the headline: “Hitler tamed by prison.” (It’s standard operating procedure for the left to liken Republican presidents to Hitler.)
April 11, 2021 Two characters are discussing Shakespearean lines as they supposedly relate to Trump, though without mentioning him by name: “A most notable coward!” “An infinite and endless liar!” “An hourly promise-breaker!”
At that point, someone else chimes in: “He’s off Twitter. He’s gone! Why is everyone still obsessing over the former guy?” Trudeau might want to ask himself that.
Aug. 29, 2021:Trudeau also ridicules Trump supporters. A public address announcer asked for a hand signal at a stadium rally where MAGA hat-wearing, redneck people were present. “Who here refuses to get vaccinated?” The cartoonist then tut-tuts: “Even though the unvaccinated are the only people still dying of COVID.” That was demonstrably false, even back then.
It’s doubtful Trudeau will call out the double-vaxxed, double-boosted Biden over his repeated assertions that COVID-19 is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” after the president last week contracted it twice.
Nor has Trudeau pointed out that more Americans have died of COVID in Biden’s first 18 months in office than under Trump in his final year-and-a-half, despite the former having benefited from inheriting the vaccines developed on his predecessor’s watch.
Sept. 19, 2021: “Doonesbury” returned to the COVID theme with “your favorite still-president” supposedly suing for vaccine royalties (untrue) and perpetuating the falsehood spread by the mainstream media that Trump had advocated testing injections of bleach as a treatment. That was taken totally out of context, as any honest reading of Trump’s admittedly rambling April 23, 2020, musing on the subject would show.
February 6th and 13th, 2022 “At The state funeral for the 45th president,” it’s suggested that no one would attend “except out of curiosity.” That’s ludicrous on its face, given the tens of thousands who typically show up for Trump’s arena-sized rallies. Also, disheveled “MAGA mourners” are depicted shouting “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”
May 1, 2022 A TV news report explains that Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his invasion of Ukraine “with relentless propaganda”; specifically, that it was necessary to purge the country of Nazis. The camera cuts to a man wearing a red MAGA cap, and a woman wearing a Q (for Qu-Anon), T-shirt as Trump reiterates his claim that he won 2020. In a cheap shot, the man says, “It’s Nazis. Nazis stole it,” to which the woman replies: “Wait, aren’t they on our side?”
June 6, 2022: The aforementioned ex-dictator of Berzerkistan, talking to an ambulance-chasing lawyer in an emergency room, offers him a job working for “the current president of the United States.” Lawyer: “You work for Trump?” Ex-dictator: “You’re hired.” (Never mind that slip-and-fall tort lawyers overwhelmingly support Democrats.)
There were many other examples, but these were the most intellectually dishonest or mean-spirited.
Moreover, Trump is far from the only target of Trudeau’s poison pen. During the same 18-month period reviewed, “Doonesbury” also viciously attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia; Sens. Josh Hawley, Lindsay Graham, South Carolina, Ted Cruz, Texas; former governor of Alaska. Sarah Palin and Tucker Carlson, Fox News host.
What do they share in common? They’re all conservative Republicans. There have been no comparable “Doonesbury” fusillades fired at, say, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, Vermont independent; or any number of other left-wing Democrats—all of them eminently lampoonable. (The only Democrat to draw the wrath of “Doonesbury” was Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., for single-handedly blocking (until this week) Biden’s Build Back Better boondoggle.)
In the May 30, 2021, “Doonesbury” strip, whose storyline otherwise had nothing to do with him, Trudeau also took a gratuitous shot at Donald Trump Jr.
And that brings us back to Biden, because the cartoonist hasn’t written (or drawn) a single word about first son Hunter Biden, whose corrupt multimillion-dollar business dealings around the globe and whose well-publicized drug use and repeated escapades with hookers are surely editorial cartoon fodder. They certainly would be if it were either of Trump’s sons—and rightly so.
Trudeau’s closest encounter with the president was obliquely on Nov. 7, a year after his election. A recurring swashbuckler character, “the Rascal,” travels to Afghanistan to rescue Americans stranded there by Biden’s abrupt U.S. pullout in August. “Oh, my God! Taliban warplanes!” one of the would-be rescuees shouts. “Relax,” the Rascal says. “They don’t know how to fly them yet.”
Trudeau is apparently more concerned about the Americans stranded in Afghanistan than the president is, but note the absence of any acknowledgement that Biden is responsible for them being there or for the fact that the Taliban have warplanes at all—U.S. warplanes that he left behind in his reckless withdraw.
“Doonesbury” also has not savaged Biden for any aspect of his omnishambles administration—the highest-ever gas prices, a 40-year-high rate of inflation, open-borders illegal immigration, soaring violent crime rates and homelessness in our cities, its pro-transgender war on (real) women, unqualified and incompetent Cabinet members, or anything else.
Biden’s pratfalls on the steps of Air Force One or on a bike trail in Delaware never happened as far as “Doonesbury” is concerned. Neither have the innumerable verbal miscues made by the president and his in-over her-head vice president Kamala Harris.
The fact of the matter is, “Doonesbury” hasn’t been funny—just nasty—for years. It leapt the shark years ago.
Gary Larson, creator of “The Far Side,” and Bill Watterson, the artist behind “Calvin and Hobbes,” prematurely retired those comic strips (both of them far funnier than the long-in-the-tooth “Doonesbury” ever was) and did so at the height of their popularity, no less.
If Trudeau weren’t such a left-wing political hack, he would have hung up his poison pen long ago.
A version of this column first appeared here The Washington Times.
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