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

The Republican Party is not the party of Lincoln anymore. It’s now the party of Trump. They’re not even the party of Teddy Roosevelt or Eisenhower anymore. Even the more conservative Reagan doesn’t fit today’s Republican Party. Even Richard Nixon isn’t corrupt and dishonest enough for today’s GOP.

My friend and a guy whose work I often criticize, Michael Ramirez, wrote a long, painfully-detailed column on Facebook explaining to his fans why he stands with the truth, why he refuses to carry the lie that Trump won the election, had it stolen from him, or that anyone but Trump supporters attacked our nation’s Capitol building. In the column, he writes how his party, the GOP, is on the right side of the issues and the majority of Americans are with them. He’s wrong.

Michael has been long recognized for how talented he is. He has two Pulitzer Prizes. He’s very intelligent and his column is extremely eloquent…as though he went to great lengths to be eloquent. But, no amount of brains is going to save you when you’re as hyper partisan as he is and you’re bullshitting your balls off (I am less eloquent).

If you have to explain your stance in not accepting a lie to your lying party, maybe you’re in the wrong party.

Mike swings from refusing to accept the Big Lie to using the Big Lie to justify voter suppression laws. He wrote, “We don’t need to lie or deceive ourselves to win” and follows that with, “The truth is, conservative policies work and theirs do not.”

No, conservative policies don’t work. Did that huge Trump tax cut for asshole billionaires, trust-fund babies, and corporations work? Did it reduce the deficit? Did the “trickle-down” theory put more money in the middle class’ pocket? No, it did not. How about those two tax cut for asshole billionaires to finance two wars? What about all the racist policies?

Republican policies attract Nazis and Klansmen. Mike is right to accept that it was Trump followers who attacked the Capitol but he didn’t recognize them as terrorists. When you attack a government in a bloody coup attempt to overturn an election, you’re a fucking goddamn terrorist.

The fun part of his column were the comments from his readers. Most reject that President Biden won. They reject the truth. Some argue there’s no way a failed racist stupid fast-food peddling game show host could lose an election because they saw so many pro-Trump signs in their neighborhoods. How could a guy lose an election after trashing the economy and doing nothing while watching hundreds of thousands of Americans die from a pandemic he politicized and lied about? How could Trump lose the popular vote to Joe Biden after losing it to Hillary Clinton? How could a guy who repeatedly chose Putin over America be rejected by American voters? How could an impeached president (sic) lose an election while on his way to a second impeachment? It boggles the mind.

To reject that Biden won the election is to reject democracy. Oh, Republicans love democracy until they don’t get what they want.

A majority of Republicans believe Donald Trump won the election and somehow President Biden stole it with the help of Republican leaders in states like Georgia and Arizona. The party is about to oust Liz Cheney from leadership, not because she doesn’t support Republican policies, but because she refuses to support the Big Lie.

Here’s the question for Republicans like my friend: If you don’t want to be in a cult, then why are you a Republican? It seems you would have quit when the Nazis came knocking.

Creative note: I wrote this cartoon in the middle of last week and thought my editor at CNN might like it. He loved it and approved it around 10:00 AM Friday morning. I dug it too and took my time with it. A few cartooning colleagues have patted me on the back for it which I truly appreciate it. Even though we’ve all been to the site, I used a great black-and-white photo for reference from the New York State Archives I found while doing a Google image search. This is a case where I’m really satisfied with a cartoon and will check it months down the line to see if I still like it.

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