Image by Kelly Sikkema.

Honestly, as 2025 begins, isn’t it finally time to reimagine American history? So, what do you think of this: George Trump, Abraham Trump, Ulysses S. Trump, Franklin D. Trump, Dwight D. Trump, John F. Trump, Lyndon B. Trump, and even Richard M. and George W. Trump. And yes, of course, on January 20th, Donald J. Trump (of all people) will once again be president of these distinctly (dis-)United States of America.

As Joe Biden hobbles into… well, if not the future, then some unknown past, HE looms over us, the political equivalent of a giant armed drone about to be back in the skies of our lives. Of all the Americans whom, once upon a time, I couldn’t have dreamed of being in the White House, Donald J. Trump would have been at the top of my list. No longer, of course. Sometimes I even imagine calling my parents back from the dead and trying to explain President Trump (twice!) to them. They would be… well, flabbergasted is far too modest a word for it, even if, to put him in a context they would have understood, I had compared him to a nightmarish figure of their own time: Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

My mother was a political and theatrical caricaturist in the 1950s. Of all the drawings of hers I still have, the one that, grimly enough, I keep propped up near my desk in the room where I work — call me a masochist, if you will — is a caricature she did for the New York Post (in the pre-Murdoch days when it was still a liberal publication) of that grimmest of senators of her era, Joe McCarthy. He was the fellow who claimed that the State Department contained hundreds — yes, hundreds! — of communists. She drew that eerily smiling portrait in the spring of 1954 at the time of the Army-McCarthy hearings when he insisted that the U.S. military, too, was filled with commies and, in the process, essentially took himself down.

I was then nine years old and Senator McCarthy’s face was quite literally the first one I ever saw on a black-and-white TV in my house after the Post hired my mom to draw those televised congressional hearings. On opening our front door and walking in from school on whatever spring day that was, the face on that new TV screen was… well, the political precursor to D.J.T.,........

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