President Joe Biden grudgingly announced he was abandoning his bid for a second term in office on Sunday—just one day after marking three-and-a-half years in the White House.
That same day, as Democratic Party bosses finally succeeded in pushing the cognitively impaired Biden out of the race (more than three weeks after his disastrous debate performance), far-left political cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strip still wasn’t ridiculing Biden.
Instead, Trudeau returned to his well-trod turf yet again, attacking former President Donald Trump—for the fifth time in the past eight weeks alone, no less.
The weekly strip, featured prominently on the front page of The Washington Post’s Sunday color comics section, on July 21 depicted a constellation of a supposed “Trump Crime Org,” the kind of treatment Trudeau has never given to any of Crooked Joe and son Hunter Biden’s shady international influence-peddling business deals.
On June 30, Trump was depicted as “holding auditions” for lackey lawyers for future election challenges, and on June 23, he was portrayed as hosting a “billionaires for Trump” fundraiser. (“Nobody does tax cuts for the rich like Trump.”)
In the June 16 strip, a radio talk-show host discusses FEMA supposedly “prepositioning temporary shelters” as “reentry camps” to be used by “unmoored, confused” Trump voters if he loses in November, or by immigrants to be deported if he wins. Two Sundays earlier on June 2, at a “MAGA HQ,” the campaign office manager says “the boss wants to play dictator,” and implies that Trump is suffering from “dementia”—a condition far more likely applicable to Biden.
As such, it’s not for nothing that back on Jan. 30, following the third anniversary of the Biden administration, I dubbed Trudeau the “Patient Zero” of Trump Derangement Syndrome. A Patient Zero is the very first carrier of a communicable disease in an epidemic, the one who begins the spread.
Excerpt of June 30, 2024, ”Doonesbury,” copyright 2024 G.B. Trudeau
Remarkably, during the entire three-and-a-half years that Biden has been president, not so much as once has the president or his cocaine-and-hookers-addled son been the target of Trudeau’s poison pen.
In three previous installments of this column over the past two years, begun 18 months into the Biden presidency, I’ve been tracking Trudeau’s Trump Derangement Syndrome as manifested in his Sunday-only comic strip, which hasn’t had a new idea—much less a funny one—in many years.
>>>Previous entries in this series:
August 2022: ‘Doonesbury’ Still Attacks Trump, Ignores Biden’s Many Gaffes, Policy Failures
February 2023: Anti-Trump ‘Doonesbury’ Cartoon Finally Goes After a Biden—but With Kid Gloves
January 2024: Garry ‘Doonesbury’ Trudeau Is ‘Patient Zero’ of Trump Derangement Syndrome
Apparently, nothing Biden has done as president—from throwing open the southern border to an invasion by an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants to the reckless and humiliating pullout from Afghanistan that gifted tens of billions of dollars of military hardware to the Taliban—has been deserving of even the gentlest of criticism by Trudeau.
Never has been heard a discouraging word in “Doonesbury,” either, about the poisoned fruits of Bidenomics—45-year-high inflation and interest rates, food prices up about 20%, and gas prices still well over $1 a gallon higher than they were when he took office in January 2021.
Nor would you ever know about Biden’s countless verbal gaffes—including most recently “We beat Medicare” at the June 27 debate and his train of thought frequently derailing off to “ … anyway … ”—if you relied on “Doonesbury” as your primary source of political news and commentary.
I’ve not previously mentioned it, but Vice President Kamala Harris—now Biden’s heir apparent—likewise has been spared the “Doonesbury” bile. It’s as if Trudeau is unaware of her inexplicable love affair with coconut trees, yellow school buses (under which party pooh-bahs threw Biden), and Venn diagrams, or her hyena-like laughter at inappropriate times.
Trudeau will never tell you the term “word salad” was added to the political lexicon thanks in large part to Harris’ incoherent speeches. Nor has “Doonesbury” ever ridiculed her oft-repeated pseudo-profundity about “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” Or for her being such a horrible boss that over her first three years as veep, her staff turnover hit a whopping 92%.
For some 50 years, “Doonesbury” has been known for its partisan hack, sophomoric ridiculing of Republicans. Long before Trump, Trudeau depicted then-President George W. Bush as an asterisk (because of the disputed 2000 election) and then-Vice President Dan Quayle as a feather, implying he was a lightweight.
If Trudeau were at all honest or consistent, he would depict Biden as the sock puppet of leftist Democratic Party elites and, with quasi-apologies to Hillary Rodham Clinton, portray Harris as an empty pantsuit.
But he isn’t, so he won’t.