“Sick and disgusted.”
That’s how Jeffrey Koterba felt as he watched CNN’s presidential debate Thursday evening between President Biden and former president Donald Trump.
“Like many Americans, I was underwhelmed by Biden’s performance — and his stumbling around — and by Trump’s lies and refusal to ever answer the questions,” said Koterba, a political cartoonist syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.
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Koterba decided his deadline job was to conjure a cartoon that not only satirized the historic campaign event, but also empathized with how he imagined many other viewers must have felt. Yet how to distill his disgust and concern in a single image?
“Uncle Sam? Lady Liberty? I tend to go to those often as symbols because they’re easily recognizable, but they can be overused,” he said. Then, as his girlfriend’s son watched independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the background, Koterba thought of a famous image: The day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Chicago Sun-Times cartoonist Bill Mauldin captured a nation’s emotion by drawing a grieving Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.
In Koterba’s cartoon, Lincoln looks panicked and horrified by the debate, which he has been watching on a phone. “I don’t often draw the Lincoln Memorial in my own work,” the artist said, “but to me, the debate rose to the level of using that symbol to express my own sense of angst and frustration.”
Nick Anderson, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for the Reform Austin News in Texas, chose instead to reflect a sudden fear specifically among the Democrats — an image of electoral night terror captioned “Woke.”
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“I went to bed Thursday night worried about the election,” Anderson said, “so the ‘woke‘ idea arose from personal experience” after watching Biden’s halting performance, which even members of the president’s camp acknowledged was a poor night for him.
“Joe Biden understands better than anyone that Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy,” Anderson said. “Unfortunately, as was so painfully demonstrated Thursday, he is not the strongest candidate to meet the moment.”
By Friday, Anderson had come to believe that Biden should step aside and endorse a replacement Democratic candidate.
“There is too much at stake this election to continue on the current path,” the cartoonist said. “It would go down in history as a selfless act of patriotism.”
Some editorial artists chose to focus not on Biden, but on what they saw as Trump’s stream of untrue, misleading or inaccurate statements during the debate. (The Washington Post reported Friday that Trump made “dozens of false claims, many of them his favorites” and that Biden “made a few.”)
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Darrin Bell, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for King Features, viewed Biden’s debate performance as disastrous — and a wake-up call.
“It’s made the prospect of a Trump win a lot more plausible, and that’s going to cause millions of Americans to take it seriously and to recall why they voted against Trump in 2020,” Bell said. “They’ve got four months to remember the chaos, the pathological lying, the grifting, the inhumane treatment of immigrants, the racist utterances. They’ve got four months to decide if they’d prefer an enfeebled version of the antidote they chose in 2020, or if they’d prefer the poison itself.”
As the chorus grows in some corners of media for Biden to step aside, Bell sees matters differently: “America didn’t vote for Joe Biden because he was energetic, or young, or charismatic. America voted for him because he was not Donald Trump. As long as he’s got a pulse, he will still be the only viable candidate who is Not Donald Trump.”
Ann Telnaes, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for The Post, trained her artistic crosshairs not on Biden’s debate performance, but rather on Trump’s misdeeds and crimes.
“Regardless of how President Biden looked or sounded during the debate, the fact is Trump broke his presidential oath and incited an insurrection on the Capitol of the United States,” Telnaes said. “If you believe in our democracy, there is no excuse for voting for such a man.”
Lalo Alcaraz, the Herblock Prize-winning cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, purposefully drew an “in-between” cartoon that lampooned both candidates.
“I wasn’t as outraged or sad about Biden sounding old because he is old — he’s not going to be doing any handstands,” said Alcaraz, noting: “I can’t gloss over Biden’s performance, but I can’t ignore Trump’s baldfaced lies. The first thing I thought to draw was Biden being frozen in a block of ice, and then I thought of fire coming from Trump’s pants — a kind of visual balance and elemental balance.”
Meanwhile, Jeff Danziger, the past Pulitzer finalist for the Rutland Herald in Vermont, saved his ultimate punchline for the performance of the media, as his cartoon skewered what some media coverage has gravitated toward — even if, he said, this historic moment is not a laughing matter.
“A cartoon is a sometimes failing attempt to lighten the situation even if done with the broadest and least forgivable humor,” Danziger said. “And a good political cartoon is like a towel snap on the ass — meant to be playful, but too painful to laugh at.”
Michael Cavna is the creator of the Comic Riffs column and a former staff writer for The Washington Post.
