As Mike Luckovich watched the rioting Wednesday on Capitol Hill, as members of far-right groups took over “the people’s house,” he thought that the attempted insurrection was shocking — but not surprising.
On deadline, Luckovich’s immediate aim was to adapt the best symbology for editorial impact.
“Although Americans are familiar with the Capitol, it took me a while to come up with something people would recognize as an important, public function of the Capitol,” the cartoonist says — “until ‘lying in state’ hit me.”
Adam Zyglis also found Wednesday’s events “shocking to watch,” yet viewed the mayhem as “a sad culmination of the last four years.”
“We all knew something like this was coming,” says the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for the Buffalo News, “based on Trump’s actions and words in recent months.”
Zyglis wanted to capture “the grotesque and sad mockery being made of our democratic process, staining the sacred Rotunda” — and seized upon a viral image. “That photo circulating on Twitter of that tribally dressed, tattooed terrorist was seared in my mind,” he says. “For me, that summed up where we were at: a moment of tribal anarchy.”
Several times since last summer, Signe Wilkinson has drawn Trump clutching a gas can to symbolize his incendiary words. On Wednesday, her Trump as aural arsonist stoked his biggest blaze yet: the Hill afire as visual metaphor for democracy imperiled.
“His fires just keep getting bigger,” says Wilkinson, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for Washington Post Writers Group, who last month ended her long tenure at Philly.com. She notes that a day before the riot, she satirized Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) because he represents politicians “who have accelerated Trump’s pyrotechnics.”
Like Luckovich, Matt Davies chose to render the Rotunda, tying Wednesday’s Hill takeover directly to the president.
“Once it had become obvious that Trump had given his signal to storm the building,” Newsday’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist says, he decided to channel his “abject revulsion to the sordid, anti-democratic scene the president had unleashed as best I could.”
Davies blew deadline by about an hour, but “thinking and sketching in real time and responding to shocking news events,” he says, “is an exciting privilege that comes with drawing for a daily newspaper.”
Here is how some other cartoonists satirized Wednesday’s events:
Steve Sack (Minneapolis Star Tribune):
Peter Kuper (Cagle Cartoons):
R.J. Matson (CQ Roll Call):
Stephane Peray (Cagle Cartoons):
Kevin Siers (Charlotte Observer):
Dario Castillejos (Cagle Cartoons):
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