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Trump is Playing Calvinball

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“No sport is less organized than Calvinball.”

Calvin and Hobbes © Bill Watterson

Calvinball was an invention of comic strip showrunner Bill Watterson who said, “People have asked how to play Calvinball. It’s pretty simple: you make up the rules as you go.”

The early days of the Trump administration can be usefully understood as Calvinball for (putative) Adults.

Colin McEnroe, at Stamford Advocate, explains Trump 2.0.

… By the end of the day, a federal judge had stopped the Trump stoppage. The next day, the White House seemed to say it was rescinding the freeze plan, although Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt made it more confusing when, a little later, she said only the memo about freezing funds was rescinded but not the order in the memo. (You can do this in Calvinball.)

Calvin and Hobbes

More about Calvinball from Comic Book Resources

Selected Calvinball comic strips from GoComics

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Comments 4

  1. CalvinBall was TEGWAR before we started calling it TEGWAR.

    1. TEGWAR was in Mark Harris’s novel, “Bang the Drum Slowly,” published in 1956, two years before Bill Watterson was born. I point this out because Harris was a pal of my mother in their school days, and when he died in 2007, his friends scattered his ashes on the backyard ball field where they used to play.

      I met him once when I was nine. My main memory is that his basset hound snuck up to the coffee table and had a few slurps of somebody’s Manhattan. Which I think puts me in line with Calvin, for the most part.

      1. Thanks for the clarification. I first heard of TEGWAR from you.

  2. How sad that an inventive cartoonist like Bill Watterson is reduced to being called a showrunner!

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