When cartoonist Scott Stantis makes fun of Donald Trump he hears from angry readers who want to know why he never makes fun of the Democrats. The fact he does—he repeatedly whacked Hillary Clinton before last November’s election—makes no difference to these readers. Yesterday doesn’t peddle much influence in American politics.
I got to know Stantis in 2001 when I wrote a column about the ways editorial cartoonists responded to 9/11. Stantis, then drawing for the Birmingham News in Alabama, was president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. We spoke of the empty chair at the Tribune, left by Jeff MacNelly, who had died more than a year earlier, and of the Tribune’s lack of urgency in filling it. The paper was flirting with a few cartoonists who were all too liberal for it, in Stantis’s view, and he wondered why he wasn’t being considered.
Here he is in Prickly City:
Stantis also writes a blog, and a few days ago he made this observation:
“Franklin Pierce,” he tells me, “whose inauguration address was pretty much ‘I know I’m not up to this but please don’t hurt me.’ He’d go on benders. He’d be gone for two weeks at a time. Maybe that’s what we can hope for from Trump.”
