“Darwin. Right Again.” : Doonesbury on MAGA’s “Willing Griftees.”

This is the second part of my look at Doonesbury’s “Trump Quintet,” Garry Trudeau’s five-volume (and counting?) collection of strips about Donald Trump. Last time out, I examined how Trudeau traced the decades-long cultural and political dynamics that set the stage for a corrupt narcissist to seize the White House. I concluded by noting that while Trudeau had historically shown moments of empathy for two presidents whom he’d attacked the hardest – Nixon and Regan – his Trump cartoons deny their subject any sense of humanity: Doonesbury’s Trump is the man reduced to his grotesque, monstrous core. In this post, I’m going to look at how Trudeau’s depictions of Trump supporters underline a widespread liberal frustration with, and ultimately disdain for, those Americans whose cult-like devotion to a profoundly problematic leader puts democracy at risk. 

In recent decades especially, Trudeau has targeted Republican leaders more often and more intensely than their Democrat colleagues. That said, his satire generally “punches up,” using humour to expose powerful people and hold them to account. Trudeau has rarely gone after everyday GOP voters – or any other type of “everyday American” – in a mean-spirited way. Moreover, some of the most sympathetic Doonesbury characters – B.D. and Lacey and Dick Davenport for starters – are card-carrying Republicans.

But even Doonesbury’s most reactionary and retrograde conservatives would not have fallen in line behind Trump. In a December 2021 strip, Mike, “a moderate Republican since college,” reminds readers that while many cast members are Republicans, including B.D., Dick and Lacey, Clyde, Jim Anderson, and Phil Slackmeyer, none of them – except for “a couple of minor exceptions” – “favor voter suppression! Or violent insurrection! Or coups! Or the Big Lie!” 

As Mike winds up his monologue, Trump and his henchman Trff Bmzklfrpz, the former dictator of Berzerkistan, barge in, telling Doonesbury’s conservative “losers” to “break it up” and “disperse.” 

“Enter the exceptions,” Mike deadpans. 

As Trumpism has progressed from a joke (during the 2015/16 primary campaign, you might recall, the Huffington Post banished coverage of Trump to the “Entertainment” pages) to an existential political threat, those “exceptions” –  not just Trump and his associates, but the MAGA voters who put them in power – have become the target of some of Trudeau’s most pointed work. In the preface to the Quintet’s fourth volume, Former Guy, Trudeau describes the joyful scene in Times Square after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and contrasts that mood with events that began soon thereafter as Trump attempted to overturn the election results, culminating in a brutal attack on Congress. The “gleaming turd” of Trump’s “Big Lie” gained traction, Trudeau notes, because “Trump had been prophetic. He’d warned [his supporters] about The Steal, and now it was time for them to rise up and take their country back.” 

By then, Trudeau had long ago reached his limit with Trump supporters; the “liberal impulse … to empathize” with the folks profiled in “a thousand sorties to MAGA country” undertaken by reporters hoping to understand Trump’s appeal had reached its expiration date. Trudeau’s disdain for MAGA-Americans is explicit: “it’s embarrassing,” he writes, “to live in a country with so many willing griftees.” Given what’s happening in Trump’s name, his supporters’ credulity is fair game: it might’ve once been “patronizing” to satirize MAGAs as “dupes,” but now “the stakes are too high, the authoritarian threat too real” to not hold them accountable for what they had done to the country. The next compilation’s title page – an imagined ad for a Trump “Value Pak” consisting of a pair of Trump-branded sneakers and two copies of the Trump Bible – mocks the gullibility of Trump’s marks as much as it does his own hucksterism. 

The fatal combination of COVID, Trump’s incompetence, and MAGA gullibility presented GBT with an opening to spoof Trump supporters with a disdain he has rarely displayed for everyday people. On 31 May 2020, Roland, covering an anti-lockdown protest at a state capitol, interviews a guy in a MAGA cap; someone’s carrying a Confederate flag behind him. The man calls the coronavirus a “Democrat hoax” because “Trump said so.” The strip ends with Roland talking to a muscle-bound protestor who, after saying he was “too young and cut to catch” COVID, starts to cough. Mike and Kim, watching at home, react coldly and smugly to the sight of someone coming down with a potentially deadly disease:

“Real-time natural selection,” Kim says as she glares at the screen. Mike doubles down on the bitterness: “Darwin. Right again.”

Four years later, with Trump facing trial for a truly astonishing number of state and federal felony indictments, Trudeau put readers at the kitchen table with a couple going through their bills. Their situation is bleak: he’s at risk of having his wages garnished by the IRS, so they’re going to skip the car payment this month; her tips will cover most of daycare, but the electric bill is overdue. 

Once they pay the bills they can, the couple only have $17.58 to contribute to “Mr. Trump’s legal bills.” “Even less than last month,” she sighs, obviously disappointed they couldn’t do more. 

The traditional second Doonesbury punchline comes from an off-panel voice:

“Mom? We’re hungry.”

There’s no shortage of analyses of how the events of the last decade have eroded ties between different groups of Americans. One dynamic (of many) running through the weakening of a shared sense of belonging between MAGA-Americans – especially those from a White, working-class background – and their more liberal counterparts is that many of the latter have moved beyond being confused and frustrated with those friends, family members, neighbours and co-citizens who have embraced Trumpism to holding those people in utter disregard. These strips make that dynamic palpable.

Doonesbury’s 14 May 2023 strip captures something of the rabid intensity of Trump supporters. Trump is on TV decrying the “failing, fake, vile, disgusting, radical-left, Soros-funded disgraceful witch hunt” being directed at him, and telling his supporters that he is all that stands in the way of the law “coming after” them. A wide-eyed man in a MAGA cap – the kind of guy we saw inside the Capitol on 6 January – watches and rants at his wife, wide-eyed in panic: if  Trump goes to jail, the man will be “totally exposed” as the “Deep State” comes for him, even as he maniacally lies that he “didn’t do nothin’.”     

Strips like these point towards the class and cultural dynamics underpinning the social divisions that Trumpism has exploited and exacerbated. The couple at the table are working poor; the men Roland interviews are wearing Carhartt work clothes and trucker caps. The guy watching Trump on teevee is drinking a beer, an empty can tipped over on the couch beside him, an overflowing ashtray on the table – these, and the man’s overweight wife in sweats, may be read as a bit of “white trash” stereotyping. 

Mike, on the other hand, is a successfully retired entrepreneur; Kim his software-engineer partner; they live in a very comfortable home in Seattle; their daughter Alex went to M.I.T. 

Notwithstanding some elements of that last cartoon, I don’t think those class dynamics are principally what’s driving Trudeau’s satire. He’s not laughing at these people because they’re poor; Alex’s husband Toggle grew up in a trailer park, and Trudeau didn’t make his background a topic in any way that implies a class-based “punching-down” on his part. He’s laughing at these people because they’re “willing griftees.” 

At the same time, however, it’s fair to say that these strips reflect what one commentator called the the “sorrowful and condescending” attitude that many “liberals at dinner parties” have towards the white working class – people defined by those liberals by their “irascibility, irrationality and ignorance,” making them a suitable target for the “anxiety and prejudice of the middle classes.”

In a fuller context, Trudeau’s cartooning about Trump supporters isn’t simply about ridiculing a group of Americans for their political commitments, it’s about using humour to reveal those commitments for what they are: a profound threat to American democracy. Doonesbury  links the MAGA fanaticism embraced by that broke couple wrestling with their bills at the kitchen table to a particularly frightening aspect of Trump’s grip on power: the fact that he’s losing his mind. (Day One Dictator was almost titled Day One Dementia.) GBT believes that Trump’s decline is not getting the attention it deserves not only because of how anxiety over “the stench of pending authoritarianism … [distracts] from the gathering psychiatric consensus that Trump is rapidly sliding into senility,” but also because  “cult members are, by definition, resistant to reality,” and MAGA-Americans are simply unable to see what is happening to their leader as he stumbles from one bizarre pronouncement to the next. 

Next time out, we’ll take an extended look at how Garry Trudeau has dealt with Trump’s cognitive decline, his longer history of obvious mental illness, how a strip about his documented history of sexual violence may have contributed to the cartoonist losing a longtime client, and what this all says about the possibilities of satire in times where reality is already parody.

Stay tuned.