Donald Trump: a New Face of Politics 

Donald Trump “new face of Politics”

Donald Trump is a gift to political cartoonists and satirists in general. One of the oldest and clearest depictions of a political election is as a race.  It is easy to depict and there is little confusion that when one candidate crosses the finish line and the others have not, a winner can be declared.  The race as a metaphor can also obscure clarity of a contest.  Take the following cartoon of May 31, 2016 by Clay Bennett as an example.

  Donald Trump is depicted crossing the finish line.  The cartoonist depicts the tape not having been broken and the two GOP members who were holding the tape refuse to let go. Has Trump won the race or not? We will find out at theconvention.

His policy positions are extreme, though some are extreme left while others are extreme right.  His public statements are the definition of “gaffe.”  It would seem Trump is a godsend for political cartoonists.  While that may have been true during the beginning of the election cycle, that may no longer be the case, in political cartoon culture, cartoonists are given one opportunity to state the obvious on an issue.  After that, they are challenged to look beyond the obvious and examine underlying realities.  Cartoonists are expected to push the boundaries of convention and cause the public to consider ideas that are neither readily apparent nor popular. Raman Lurie called the editorial cartoon “the most extreme form of expression that a society will accept or tolerate.” In this case, readers are asked to consider that there are some entities worse than Donald Trump.

May 3, 2016 was the day that Donald Trump won the Indiana primary,???the day it became clear that, despite all the talk of a brokered GOP convention, Trump was going to be the Republican nominee. For some people, Trump was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Where did this charlatan come from? This demagogue? This con man? This snake oil salesman? This racist, sexist, vile, ignorant rube? Trump is the pathetic and frightening answer to the question the Irish poet W.B. Yeats posed almost a century ago in his poem, The Second Coming: “And what rough beast, its hour come around at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

On the June 7 Trump has reached 1,238. With 303 delegates at stake in five state primaries on June 7, Trump will easily pad his total, avoiding a contested convention in Cleveland. Trump, a political neophyte who for years delivered caustic commentary on the state of the nation from the sidelines but had never run for office, fought off 16 other Republican contenders in an often-ugly primary race. Many on the right have been slow to warm to Trump, wary of his conservative bona fides. Others worry about his crass personality and the lewd comments he’s made about women. But millions of grass-roots activists, many of them outsiders to the political process, have embraced Trump as a plain-speaking populist who is not afraid to offend.

Businessman Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primaries, representing a dramatic policy shift from traditional conservatism to a more aggressive populist theme with overtones of cultural identity politics. Numerous high-profile Republicans, including past nominees like Mitt Romney, announced their opposition to Trump, even after he was formally nominated as the GOP candidate for President. He won the primary by taking advantage of the failures of institutions like the Republican Party and TV media. In accomplishing that he broke many of the conventional rules that go into primary elections. Some believe that Trump will go and break the rules of the general election as well. Throughout the primary Trump had a lead in almost every national poll. Almost everyone thought Trump would lose despite the numbers that were in front of them. The data was almost never wrong, the pundits were. People see any indication that the data is wrong now.

The 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump was formally launched on June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower in New York City. Trump was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in the 2016 election, having won the most state primaries, caucuses, and delegates at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He chose Mike Pence, the sitting Governor of Indiana, as his vice-presidential running mate. Trump’s populist positions in opposition to illegal immigration and various trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, earned him support especially among voters who were male, white, blue-collar and those without college degrees.

Some of Trump’s remarks were controversial and helped his campaign garner extensive coverage by the mainstream media, trending topics, and social media. Trump’s campaign rallies attracted large crowds, as well as public controversy. Some of the events were marked by incidents of violence between Trump supporters and protesters, mistreatment of some journalists, and disruption by a large group of protesters who effectively shut down a major rally in Chicago. Trump was accused of inciting violence at his rallies. He criticized women for their looks. And he unleashed an uncanny marketing ability in which he deduced his critics’ weak points and distilled them to nicknames that stuck. “Little Marco” Rubio, “Weak” Jeb Bush and “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, among others, all were forced into reacting to Trump. They fell one-by-one ” leaving Trump the sole survivor of a riotous Republican primary. His rallies became magnets for free publicity. Onstage, he dispensed populism that drew thousands of supporters, many wearing his trademark “Make America Great Again” hats and chanting, “Build the wall!” The events drew protests too” with demonstrators sometimes forcibly ejected from the proceedings. One rally in Chicago was canceled after thousands of demonstrators surrounded the venue and the Secret Service could no longer vouch for the candidate’s safety.

Trump’s disdain for political correctness was a staple theme of his campaign and proved popular among his supporters. Many, including some mainstream commentators and some prominent Republicans, viewed him as appealing to racism, a charge that he “repeatedly and vehemently denies.” Trump’s most polarizing and widely reported proposals were about issues of immigration and border security, especially his proposed deportation of all illegal immigrants, the proposed construction of a substantial wall on the Mexico??“United States border at Mexican expense, his characterizations of many Mexican immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.”, and a temporary ban on foreign Muslims entering the U.S.

Bibliography

1. Dave Astor, “Editorial Cartooning Post 9-11,” Editor and Publisher 4 February 2002. Internet: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/editorial-cartooning-post-9-11/.
2. Chris Lamb, Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004. 22.
3. https://www2.timesfreepress.com/search/cartoon+on+donald+trump/month/1/
4. https://m.timesofindia.com/us-elections-2016/Donald-Trump-reaches-the-magic-number-to-clinch-US-Republican-presidential-nomination/articleshow/52453676.cms

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