Yesterday, we saw something we haven’t seen in eight years — the peaceful transfer of power. Vice President Kamala Harris, showing the grace that characterized her campaign, recorded the 2024 electoral college votes before a joint session of both houses of Congress. Unlike four years ago, nobody objected, nobody had to hide under benches, nobody had to run for their life, nobody died.
And unlike four years ago, when members of the Trump Administration made things as difficult as possible for the Biden transition team, Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s highly capable incoming Chief of Staff, has reported the utmost cooperation from the outgoing Biden team. One wonders how January 6th, 2025, would have unfolded had Trump lost and Harris won.
It is all preparing the way for the billionaires to be front and center, rather than in their usual roles of the guys pulling the strings behind the curtain. This is in stark contrast to their immediate reaction to the insurrection attempt four years ago.
As Josh Marshall wrote yesterday in his Talking Points Memo:
The now incoming President led a criminal attempt to overthrow the republic to reverse the outcome of an election he lost. One has to peel back so many layers of time to remember that a good percentage of corporate America announced at the time that they would stop backing members of Congress who had supported the effort by refusing to vote to certify the results of the election, a boast that required cutting off support to the bulk of congressional Republicans.
Well, that moral stance didn’t last long, and to see how far in the rear of the democracy battle corporate America has retreated, one only need look at Ann Telnaes, the only female editorial cartoonist to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Reuben Award, the highest award a cartoonist can earn. Only two other cartoonists have ever done that.
A few days ago, Telnaes quit her job with the Washington Post, because editors had killed this cartoon lampooning America’s oligarchs, which included her boss, Jeff Bezos:
Telnaes has been creating magnificent editorial cartoons for the Post since 2008, and, as she wrote yesterday:
I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
The job of the political, or editorial, cartoonist is to afflict the comfortable — quickly. What takes me 800 to 1,000 words to say, persuasively I hope, people like Ann Telnaes can illustrate in the blink of an eye.
The pathfinder of political cartoonists was Thomas Nast, who, between 1857 and 1887, drew approximately 2,250 cartoons for Harper’s Weekly. Nast stuck his sharply pointed pens deep into the eyes of the high and mighty from the Civil War, through Reconstruction, and all the way to the Chinese Exclusion period.
When Nast died in 1902, the New York Times eulogized him as the “Father of the American Political Cartoon,” an honorific bestowed in no small part for Nast’s biting political caricatures of William M. (Boss) Tweed who ran New York City’s Democratic political machine at Tammany Hall.
The cartoonists who came after him, all the way to Ann Telnaes, have carried the baton he passed with scathing grace.
And they stick together. Immediately following Telnaes’s resignation, her friends began to pour it on. Here’s an example, published yesterday by Steve Brodner, the first artist to be inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame:
Here’s another, by Emma Cook:
Ironically, spiking the Telnaes cartoon may have caused it a far wider distribution than if WAPO’s editors had just let it run.
Because political cartoonists can connect so viscerally with the public, theirs is sometimes a dangerous life. During the 1930s, German Jewish cartoonists took their lives in their hands by skewering Nazi bigwigs. You could tell they were successful, because so many had to flee the country.
In the present time, we should not forget that today is the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo murders. On 7 January 2015, in Paris, two French-born Algerian Muslim brothers, Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, targeted the employees of the French satirical weekly magazine in a terrorist attack. The brothers killed twelve and severely injured eleven.
Political cartooning can be a risky business.
Meanwhile, back here in what Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address, called the “shining city upon a hill,” the fun is about to begin. Trump’s cabinet picks will begin their confirmation process. As if we didn’t know already, we are soon to confirm just how much spine Republican senators have. Can they actually stomach the likes of retribution-minded Kash Patel leading the dedicated men and women of the Justice Department; accused sexual predator and beer-quaffing Pete Hegseth, running the Defense Department, the largest department in all of government; Bashar al–Assad and Putin buddy Tulsi Gabbard, overseeing America’s secrets as Director of National Intelligence; and Bobby Kennedy’s son and John Kennedy’s nephew, the vaccine-denying, loopy-thinking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., making health care decisions for the nation?
Many of us were glued to our screens as we watched the House Special Committee investigate and get to the truth of the insurrection of January 6th, 2021, a day of infamy. But the hypocrisy and lies we are about to witness as these unqualified and dangerous people worm their way through to their new jobs will be an even better show not to be missed.
Ann Telnaes and friends are going to have a field day. If only it really mattered.
