Kevin Kallaugher points out something you should already know, which is that Dear Leader is celebrating his return to power but wearing blinders to avoid facing a major crisis that he has dismissed as a hoax.
It’s certainly not because any reputable scientists have assured him that it isn’t real, but perhaps it’s somehow linked to the meeting he had with oil company executives in which he pledged to uphold their interests in return for a billion dollars.
To be sure, that was a proposed campaign contribution, not to be confused with the $1.7 billion his company made during his first term, according to David Cay Johnson, through things like charging his Secret Service security squads full retail price on hotel rooms he owned.
And Kal drew that cartoon before yesterday’s announcement that Trump is nominating Chris Wright to be his energy secretary. Wright is currently head of a fracking company and has declared that there isn’t any climate crisis, explaining that “There is no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy, all energy sources have impacts on the world both positive and negative.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
As nations met in Baku to discuss what nearly every reputable climate scientist in the world believes is happening to the planet, Pett and Jennings pointed out how America’s leadership role is being seen by the rest of the world, now that we’ve got a stable genius about to take over.
After all, 97% of climate scientists may believe in climate change, but how many of them have uncles who taught at MIT?
Matt Wuerker (Politico) suggests that perhaps the plain folks who put Trump into office weren’t actually making the anti-elite move they thought they were.
In movies like Meet John Doe, A Face in the Crowd and Elmer Gantry, the conmen were down at the heels (but not down on their luck) working-class hustlers, but perhaps that’s just how Hollywood elites saw scammers.
Now we’ve got a combination of Lonesome Rhodes and Charles Foster Kane running the con, and he’s roped in pigeons who wouldn’t be allowed through the gates at, in Wuerker’s words, “Moolah Lago.”
Part of the con is the age-old promise of every man a king and a chicken in every pot and what Keith Olberman called “Lotto Nation,” the totally unrealistic, nonsensical view that one day Joe Sixpack is going to become fabulously wealthy.
It’s ridiculous, but it works. George Parker was unique in his ability to repeatedly sell some rube the Brooklyn Bridge, but the world is full of less ambitious conmen who didn’t wind up in Sing Sing because they kept a lower profile.
Which they had to, because they didn’t have the Supreme Court on their side.
Ella Baron is hardly the first commentator to bring up George Orwell and 1984, and, as I’ve said several times, I prefer Animal Farm because 1984 is based on repression while in Animal Farm, the animals allow themselves to be suckered by glib slogans and false promises.
Still, the parallel between the Ministry of Truth and the emerging Trump administration is inescapable. At the end of Animal Farm, the animals begin to realize they’ve been conned, but Orwell doesn’t tell us what happens next.
But he wrote 1984 four years after he’d written Animal Farm, so maybe that’s the answer: You get them to volunteer, but if they begin to wise up, you clamp down.
We’re still at the “Four legs good, two legs better” stage, but stay tuned.
Some Americans are looking into leaving the country, but, as Rod Emmerson points out, they’re discovering that the economic woes Trump focused on for his victory are largely universal, and most of the places where a Yank might want to live are just as unaffordable as our own.
New Zealand and Australian cartoonists have been complaining about housing costs, but, given that the price of eggs seems to have become the American standard, you may want to check this out before filing for landed immigrant status somewhere.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
I’m pairing these two because political cartoons are not required to be funny, but here are two exceptions.
Brodner didn’t have to reach a whole lot, since Russia has openly applauded the proposal to make Tulsi Gabbard head of intelligence here. And I say “here” because there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of difference between her working for us and her working for them.
They’ve even called her “our girlfriend,” which provides a nice segue to Morland’s depiction of a cuckolded Trump stumbling onto his soulmate Vladimir in bed with his great good friend Kim Jong Un, while another of his heroes, Xi Jinping, looks on impassively.
You don’t suppose all those love letters were … insincere? Geez, first Melania refuses to live with him anymore and now this. Almost makes you feel sorry for the guy, but at least he’s still got Laura.
What I said here about good journalists four years ago applies equally to savvy politicians, among whom I would list Kim, Xi and Putin.
By contrast, Trump is clever, but he’s not savvy.
Harry Truman never really said “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” but it’s not a bad idea, and I’d note that Trump doesn’t have one.
Which makes this David Rowe cartoon problematic. I’m not sure Trump is really in Elon’s pocket, though it’s hard to make personal judgments about either man, because they are, neither of them, emotionally built like normal people.
There are persistent rumors that the people around Trump have had just about enough of Musk, but every pot has a lid and it’s possible that their emotional oddities make them fit well. If so, it may be one more factor, like his short attention span and his unwillingness to read briefing papers, that his staff will have to work around.
On the other hand, both men are mercurial and I wouldn’t stand too close in case of an explosion.
Dave Brown has his doubts about RFK Jr, as do we all, but he may be right about Trump and Musk, since Napoleon and Pius VII had a pragmatic, difficult relationship that seemed to include neither friendship nor respect.