Grifty Inauguration

Here’s your cartoon for this week’s CNN Opinion newsletter. Please sign up to get these in your inbox every Sunday.

Once again, I forgot to blog my CNN cartoon. This ran in last week’s newsletter. But, this particular cartoon will remain topical until Joe Biden’s inauguration. You know, it’ll be Joe Biden’s inauguration because he won the election…and Donald Trump lost.

Weeks before the election, I asked a colleague, “What if Trump doesn’t attend the inauguration?” My colleague said, “Who cares?”

And that’s it. Who cares? It doesn’t matter, or at least it shouldn’t, that Trump won’t attend the inauguration and will probably conduct a fundraiser at the exact same time. It shouldn’t matter to the rule of law if Donald Trump never concedes and claims until the end of time he won when he didn’t. It shouldn’t even matter if Donald Trump hasn’t started packing yet.

The only thing that matters is that Donald Trump and Republicans are continuing to incite division, and in a lot of cases to come, violence. Donald Trump tried to invalidate his predecessor and now he’s doing it to his successor.

Donald Trump ran a campaign on hate. His political career started with hate by championing the birther movement, that President Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible for the presidency. He started his presidential campaign on hate with his “build the wall” bullshit and calling Mexicans “rapists and murderers.” He conducted his entire presidency on hate, defending and retweeting Nazis and throwing brown babies in jail when his policies weren’t killing them. Now, he’ll continue to fundraise on hate…and lies.

Donald Trump lost. That’s the truth. The courts know it. You do too. But Donald Trump will continue to use the lie he won and that he’s the most persecuted person in the history of people to grift.

Creative note: I first drew the crowd without facemasks. And even though this is for CNN, I sometimes shoot these to my two daily proofreaders, Hillary and Laura. And it was Laura who said, “shouldn’t they be wearing facemasks. I could have gotten away with not redrawing every face and letting it fly as is, but it would’ve haunted me. And at that moment early into a Friday evening, I was so glad to be done and could have dinner while watching the Mandalorian. It’s all I wanted to do…but I had to go back and redraw all the faces. And ya’ know, I like the way it turned out much better than the non-facemasks version. All that blue works for me.

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Watch me draw: