CSotD: Asked and Unanswered and Asked Again
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President Trump’s bizarre answer to Christine Welker’s question on Meet The Press continues to draw criticism and ridicule. As noted here yesterday and in many other places across a wide span of media, the presidential oath is not complicated:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Trump said he didn’t know if he is required to uphold the Constitution because he’s not a lawyer, but Byrnes is hardly the only one to question how anyone — even without a law degree — could miss the plain meaning of that 37-word sentence.
The snark and laughter that followed has hardly been the gravest blow the president and his minions have suffered in recent days, and Joyce Vance laid out the bad news in a celebratory Substack posting listing the losses in attempting to confirm Ed Martin as US Attorney in DC, to remove air quality monitoring in National Parks, in using the Alien Enemies Act as justification for summary deportations and in trying to alter the vote count in North Carolina’s state supreme court election.
Still, Dear Leader’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days are being marked in political cartoons as well as in serious analytical columns.
His proposal to place a tariff on films made in “foreign lands” has prompted jokes, but even those attempting to cover it in a neutral manner are having a tough time even trying to understand how it could work and what the president’s intentions are.
To start with, what if an American company were to remake Around the World in 80 Days? Would they be expected to recreate all those exotic locales on studio backlots? And would the tariffs only apply to the percentage of scenes shot in each country, based on their so-called “reciprocal” tariffs.
And what is being tariffed? The film prints that theaters receive? The tickets sold to customers? Revenue from Netflix streaming?
At least the popcorn is probably grown in this country, but the proposal is ridiculous and unworkable.
Juxtaposition of the Day
And still on the topic of movie-related foolish ideas, Trump’s decision to rebuild Alcatraz, which came to him in a revelation while watching a Clint Eastwood movie and no I’m not making that up is so profoundly and obviously unworkable that it’s even being ridiculed by two of Dear Leader’s usual defenders.
There’s a legend from the 60’s that says when Walter Cronkite spoke against the Vietnam War, LBJ realized that, if he’d lost Cronkite, the jig was up and he’d have to end it.
Perhaps a new apocryphal tale will emerge of Trump losing Benson and Bok, though it’s doubtful he’d notice and even more doubtful that he’d throw in the towel on this cunning plan.
It’s not clear what it means when the local sheriff’s department joins in the laughter, but I don’t think it advances things.
There are loyalists still out there, and Kelley joins in the plan to keep Biden’s fitness in his final days at the top of people’s minds, but he may be leaning into a headwind as the question has begun to emerge of the current president’s fitness to govern.
Varvel, too, remains loyal to Trump and depicts him giving Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the bird, literally. But, again, it’s an uphill battle, because anyone paying attention to the news knows that Carney was elected by Canadians offended by Trump’s imperialistic threats to their country, and that, before their fury coalesced around the Liberal Party, Carney was a 26-point underdog.
Perhaps the view is clearer from Australia, because Rowe not only depicts the uneven meeting but throws in a pun on the PM’s name as a jab at Trump’s redecorating the Oval Office to look like a tacky carnival booth.
While, coincidentally, Sorensen also seizes on the nonsensical idea of deporting birds, but does it not in an attempt to humiliate Canadians but in order to ridicule Dear Leader’s ambitious plans to deport all foreigners, or at least those coming from the lands to our south.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t take a great deal of insight to peer past the medieval setting of Loper’s cartoon to catch the commentary on the double-dealing of the Man Who Would Be King and who has added nearly three billion dollars to his family’s fortunes in the six months since his election.
Loper’s king even has two sons and a daughter, though he didn’t include the blank folders with which Dear Leader decorated the table in 2017 when he explained how his children would take over the family business so he could be ethically removed from suspicion of profiteering.
On a more serious note, Davies calls out the blatant hypocrisy of Trump hiding behind respect for the sovereignty of El Salvador as an excuse for defying both the courts and rising public opinion while he ignores the fact that Canada and Greenland are on his expansionist agenda.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Nor is there a lot of humor in how Knight and Two Bulls depict the future for those who failed to plan ahead and be born into the top 1%.
Dear Leader and his cohorts explain that sacrifices must be made but that having less will be really, really good for everyone. Except them, but they’ll manage somehow to get by with more than two dolls and five pencils and without having wonderful fulfilling jobs in factories.
Best of all, in this best of all possible worlds, removing bothersome EPA restrictions will make it possible for everyone to join in helping to make the water turn black.
Rising to a Point of Personal Privilege
As you have no doubt read, Ann Telnaes picked up her second Pulitzer Prize yesterday. There’s been a lot of professional coverage, but I hope you’ll come to my embiggenator for a less formal appreciation of how her work helped make my educational efforts more effective and fun, back before I started doing CSotD.
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