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Trump leaves office. The nightmare is over.

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For these last seven days (hopefully) of TRUMPTRUMP I’m writing about the project. This is day 7, see the others below Today: THE END

It’s over and after posting this I will post the last TRUMPTRUMP of his presidency. There will be another week of drawings as wild beasts and monsters eat the goo he melted down into. Trump’s poison will linger and infect.

My plan was to, over the last month, slowly take out and “kill” all my recurring characters, both figures in Trump’s orbit and the flotsam I had running around. Knives, spiders, klansmen.

The attempted coup on Jan 6 stopped that plan for me, so it’s been the past four days where the Trump enablers have had swords stuck in their heads and are gone. All my little friends gone, Never for me (hopefully) to draw again.

Here’s what I have learned at the end of this about Trump: He is a hollow, sad person. Fragile, stupid, incurious, clever, but has the advantage over everyone because he sincerely believes the lies he spreads. We will never get a moment of satisfaction where he repents. Our comfort should be, in addition to prosecutions and shunning, that no one likes him and all the people around him are damaged and hurt. His children have a deep sadness in them. His wife is drained of any humanity she may have had. Even his adoring cult followers are wild-eyed and confused about him. He is already Lear on the heath and he will never get back.

Here’s what I have learned at the end of this about drawing: You can get better by doing something every day. It is a good feeling to make something good.  Drawing (or any kind of making) is a shield and a sword. One has to find validation in the work because it will not come from the world. Pencils are delights.

Here’s what I have learned at the end of this about America: We are so deeply submerged in stories we tell ourselves that we have a very hard time telling fact from fiction. Trump saw this and worked it hard. I think those of us committed to justice, equity and dignity should maybe do the same.

Here’s what I have learned at the end of this about me: I’m stubborn, I’m much more lefty than I thought I was and I now have a lexicon to articulate that. Setting up organized systems makes big projects easier. Steal from other artists. I believe in drawing as a way to find, document and illuminate.

There were many times I lamented this project because I was part of the Trump ego ecosystem. Even us who hate him are part of his machine. I tried to mitigate that.

I am glad to not have to draw him, but I will miss drawing spiders and webs, klansmen, walls. I enjoyed the daily exploration of FINDING how to draw something and even know looking back I feel a great satisfaction when I see some of the drawings.

Thanks again to everyone. I’m sorry we had to go through this. THE END

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For these last seven days (hopefully) of TRUMPTRUMP I’m writing about the project. This is day 6, see the others at www.trumptrump.biz Today: How I did it and what is next,

The drawings would start with what was going on. Most of the time I would just do an online search for “Trump Administration” to see what they were up to. I’d find things in big newspapers, small newspapers, twitter feeds, trade magazines…If nothing turned up for the day that way there was always Trump’s twitter feed which never failed to be filled with horrors. I had two Google calendars for the project: “Trump” and “Trump Done” to keep track of days I might have missed. 

Yes, there were days I missed and went back to once in awhile. The biggest gap was in August 2017 when the Unite the Right rally stomped all over Charlottesville where I live. I just couldn’t draw that week, but I went back later and filled in. Most days I would not plan them out but I did try (after the first few months) to have a continuity between days. I did some months as 4-panel comics. Sometimes I would plan them out in my sketchbooks, or draw from other artists’ work to steal things from them and use later.

Later in the project I would look back at past years to echo those drawings, especially at Christmas and New Years. Last fall the ones leading up to the election mirrored those in 2016, with, happily, different results.

For the first few months I drew on notecards, but once Trump took office I drew on vellum finish bristol board. I bought 12x9 in. pads of on sale and chopped the pages in half. I almost always drew in pencil using cheap mechanical pencil from Staples or wherever.

I also used a fancy .3 pencil and a few chunky graphite-holders too. The past few months I’ve also used the super-deluxe Palomino Blackwing. When I drew in ink I used a Pentel brush pen. Large black areas I filled in and any screentones were added digitally in Photoshop.

After drawing I would scan them grayscale at 600 dpi. I saved the scans, and after cropping, adjusting levels and doing a little clean up would save them with file names like 21-01-20.jpg to organize by date. I use Backblaze for off-site backup and Time Machine for local.

TRUMPTRUMP.biz is set up on tumblr. When this thing started in 2016 it was a good platform for quick sites and since I didn’t expect this to go on this long (he was supposed to LOSE) I figured it would be ok.

Tumblr has been fine but if I did this again I would set up a simple Wordpress of Drupal blog on my own space. I don’t like being at the mercy of tech bros and I plan to move TT over to my own space at some point.

I bought TRUMPTRUMP.biz as a domain which is still funny to me. .biz lol.  After uploading I’d share on dedicated Facebook, instagram and twitter feeds. I’ve kept all three through the project but after it’s over I’ll be deleting Facebook at least.

Tomorrow the project is done, or rather almost done. As I had planned in 2016, for a week after he is gone I’ll draw beasts and monsters eating the goo he melted down into, pooping it out and maybe eating it again. Trump’s poison lingers.

After TRUMPTRUMP is done I’ll continue drawing LADYH8RS and USAH8RS (including all the congresspeople who voted for the coup). I’ll also draw more poetry comics and a new project, the opposite of TRUMPTRUMP, where I draw nice portraits of government workers who are helpers.

I also plan some print collections of TRUMPTRUMP, similar to the ones Retrofit made, but softcover and spanning whole years. Stay tuned.

I can’t believe this is almost over.

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The Trump Administration releases the partially plagiarized and historically inaccurate “1776 Project” which excuses America’s history of slavery, derides the legacy of the civil rights movement and equates progressivism with totalitarianism.

This is Trump’s last full day in office.

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Trump lied thousands of times as president, including “The Big Lie” that he won the election which cause the January 6 coup attempt and will destabilize the U.S. for years.

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The Trump Administration leaves office with the worst economic record since the Great depression 80 years ago.

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Trump administration slashes imperiled spotted owls’ habitat

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611 children are still in custody at the border and the Trump Administration can’t find their parents.

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For these last seven days (hopefully) of TRUMPTRUMP I’m writing about the project. This is day 5, see the others below. Today: Thank you 

Thanks to my family who watched me do this stupid thing. Sorry! But thanks for being ok with me staring at monsters every day.

Thanks to Jared at Retrofit Comics who took this project on and published two beautiful book collections of the drawings. I am forever grateful. Thanks Box Brown who started me at Retrofit. Thanks to all the reporters and editors and journalists and photographers whose work I drew from.

Thanks to my book blurbers: Dahlia Lithwick for also being pals, Austin Kleon for his generosity and good example. James Kolchalka for his support and for doing a crazy collab drawing with me, Tom for being a beacon and a great spirit, Bill Gisbson for looking and blurbing my book. Deep thanks to Sean T. Collins for seeing what I try to do.

Thanks to those who wrote about TT: R.J. Casey in The Comics Journal, Allan Haverholm, Alex Dueben, Chris Mauntner, Sarah Boxer, Raennah Lorne, F. Stewart Taylor.  SOLRAD, The Atlantic, CVille_Weekly....

Thanks to The Nib, The Daily Don and other online political cartoon folks. Even you Ben Garrison you disgusting hack

Thanks to eternal friend Todd Webb. Thanks to the weird comics crew. All the nice people who bought books or said nice things about my nasty work at shows or over the internet. Thanks to Molly for asking me to participate in the political comics conference at UVA. 

Thanks to Superchunk for “What A Time To Be Alive.” Thanks to Big Country for “Flame of the West.” Thanks to High on Fire for “Luminiferous.” Thanks to Oahu for “Slow Waves/Simple Sounds.”

Thanks to the one guy who yelled at me online, telling me I sucked and my drawings were bad because he loved Trump, but then listened to me a little when I was nice to him and after some back and forth at the end was cool with me.

Thank thanks thanks, but there is some disappointment too. Panels and talks I wasn’t included in, opportunities I couldn’t take advantage of. I know the work can be difficult to look at, doesn't always reproduce online well and wasn’t published by a big press with promotional staff.

I also know we are all tired of Trump, so tired. Mostly, I know the work stands where all my work does, in a weird place between the traditions of comics/cartooning and fine art. Not quite political cartooning, but kind of.

That said, thank you. I probably missed people who helped me along the way and I’m sorry if I did. Thank you. (not Trump, poop on him for making me draw all this).

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For these last seven days (hopefully) of TRUMPTRUMP I’m writing about the project. Today: Drawing a narcissist

Trump is a narcissist so any attention is good to him, even sustained hatred as this project became. As the months of daily drawing went on I started questioning what I was doing and why.

Two other drawing projects, daily draws of World War I and the Armenian Genocide a century later, were showing me that just documenting the facts through drawing was missing something. In all three projects I looked for ways to balance the history with the human.

In TRUMPTRUMP, I started trying to concentrate on him less and on what his minions were doing and who was being victimized by them. I still drew him and his crew (Trump, however small, is in every drawing), but I tried to resist drawings about whatever nutty thing he tweeted and looked for what his regime was doing. Environmental rollbacks, immigration crimes, weakening of our meager social safety net… 

I also tried, in a halting and inadequate way, to highlight victims. For a week in February 2018 I drew portraits of people deported by ICE. Later I drew a week of kids who had been taken for mother parents and in 2019 I drew a whole month of adults and children who had died in ICE custody. These were hard to draw because I was now so used to drawing nastiness that I didn’t know how to draw nice.

In the later years of the project, if I drew from one of his tweets, it meant that either he did say something germane to wider policies, or that I couldn’t find something that day and took an easy out.

I’m continuing, even now at the end, to try to look behind the chaff he would send up and draw about what he was enabling and who was being hurt by it.