Canadian Artist Fired After Cartoon of Trump Ignoring Immigrant Deaths Goes Viral

Canadian cartoonist Michael de Adder was fired after his illustration of Donald Trump went viral last week. On Wednesday, de Adder tweeted the cartoon, which depicted a golfing Trump standing over the bodies of the father and daughter who drowned trying cross into Texas via the Rio Grande, whose horrifying picture got so much media attention last week. Trump is asking to “play through.”

The image took off, with thousands of people all rushing in to make the same joke: that the most unrealistic part of the cartoon is Trump’s polite demeanor. De Adder did clarify that that was a choice.

But two days later, de Adder announced that his contract with a publishing company had been terminated, and he would no longer be drawing for any of the newspapers in New Brunswick.

According to Wikipedia, de Adder “draws approximately ten cartoons weekly and, at over a million readers per day, is considered the most read cartoonist in Canada.” (The publishing company denies that this cartoon was the reason why his contract was so suddenly terminated.)

“I’ve got to admit, it hurts pretty bad. I’m a New Brunswicker,” he wrote on Twitter. “I loved drawing cartoons for my home province. I’m a proud New Brunswicker.” He stresses that he’ll be fine and he has other freelancing gigs, plus a book coming out in September. Still, this is a blow.

And this is absolutely heartbreaking:

But the most depressing part of all of this has to be the realization that de Adder has now faced more consequences for Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policies than anyone in that administration. No one in that administration has been held accountable for the deaths or for the separation of families or for the horrid conditions in the private, for-profit detention centers holding thousands of children.

(ETA: I missed this last week, but John Sanders, the Acting Head of Customs and Border Protection has announced he’s stepping down. Trump says he didn’t order his resignation, though he says that about most of his turnover.)

The only person that we know of who has lost their job over these policies is former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was reportedly fired for not being willing to be awful enough to satisfy Trump.

De Adder’s firing comes just weeks after the New York Times announced they would be cutting all political cartoons from the newspaper. In a blog post, cartoonist Patrick Chappatte singled out one overtly antisemitic cartoon from April for triggering the decision.

“In April 2019, a Netanyahu caricature from syndication reprinted in the international editions triggered widespread outrage, a Times apology and the termination of syndicated cartoons,” he wrote. “Last week, my employers told me they’ll be ending in-house political cartoons as well by July. I’m putting down my pen, with a sigh: that’s a lot of years of work undone by a single cartoon – not even mine – that should never have run in the best newspaper of the world.”

Here’s what de Adder had to say of that decision at the time:

Obviously, these newspapers are free to hire and fire whomever they want. But if these decisions are being made to quash political criticism in general, that’s not okay. And if they’re doing so out of fear of retribution from the Trump administration–and we know Trump is fond of encouraging his supporters to retaliate against the media with everything from boycotts to physical violence–then that is an actual violation of both countries’ right to a free press.

(image: Michael de Adder/Twitter)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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