Who's Your Caddie?

Trump listens to a caddie who says he's more powerful than Hitler.

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have a new book titled “Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” which provides a blunt, behind-the-scenes portrait of the first 14 months of Trump’s second term, in which he has wielded his power without constraint, usually in a haphazard, improvisational manner, to persecute his perceived enemies, rattle global markets, defy the constitution and court orders, and wage war without considering the consequences.

Haberman and Swan interviewed Trump for the book. The book chronicles one instance during their interview with Trump when he showed them a document arguing he was more powerful than some of the most feared and treacherous leaders in history, including Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.

Trump said he had received the document from “a historian” during an event honoring the Hall of Fame golfer Gary Player. He ordered an aide to fetch the two-page document to show it to the journalists, which means he's proud enough of this thing to constantly have it nearby.

Trump explained to Haberman and Swan that these leaders “maintained power through fear,” and asked rhetorically, “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?” Yeah, who would do such a thing?

Later, when Swan and Haberman did some digging and discovered who the author of the document was, he turned out not to be a “presidential historian,” as Trump described him, but actually Player’s longtime caddie. The caddie told Haberman and Swan that he “had first shared his assessment of Trump’s power with Player and later explained it directly to Trump over golf in Florida.”

To get ahead of the book and this embarrassing detail, Trump posted the document on Truth Social shortly before midnight last Thursday, where he referred to the caddie as a “presidential historian.”

I don't mean to knock anyone who carries golf clubs and washes balls for a living, but I would wager that a political cartoonist such as myself is more of a historian than a golf caddie.

You would think that an American president would compare himself to America's greatest presidents, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Ike, JFK, and Obama. Instead, Trump is comparing himself to Hitler, Stalin, Attila the Hun, and Napoleon.

This, in addition to Trump having everything named after him and building monuments to himself, tells us who he aspires to be like.

Creative note:

This was the first angle.

GoComics: there have been issues over the past few days with my cartoons appearing on GoComics. The cartoons would upload into the system, but they would not land on the website. So Sunday's cartoon did not arrive until today, Monday morning. Monday's cartoon was late as well. We haven't figured it out entirely, but we may have solved the problem of the cartoons being on the website. So if you like to read my cartoons at GoComics, because you like to engage in the comments there, I'm sorry.

This is stupid: speaking of comics, there is one particular goon at GoComics who thinks he's clever when he's not, and often accuses me, out of context, of being a fan of the TV show The View. Since he is a sexist, he thinks it's funny to accuse me of watching a show hosted by women. What he reveals, other than his sexism and stupidity, is that he habitually watches the show. Honestly, I've never seen it, but not because I have anything against it. And maybe that's why I'm amused that Steve Kelley has drawn a cartoon about The View.

I had to look this up to see what he's talking about, and as usual, he's lying. Joy Behar never said she was embarrassed to be an American. She said she was embarrassed for America because of Donald Trump's UFC spectacle on the White House lawn. That's a huge difference, but that narrative probably didn't work for Steve. But even if the narrative was true, how is what Joy Behar says newsworthy? This sounds like something that was probably covered a lot on Fox News, which means it's not news. What Steve does isn't so much to find the most important subject of the day, but to draw on the biggest outrage of the day. It is the conservative media's stock in trade to sell anger. If you are not angry at something, they will give you something to be angry about.

Drawn in 30 seconds:

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