The Trump Presidency in Editorial Cartoons [Hardcover]

The Trump Presidency in Editorial Cartoons engages with close to one thousand editorial cartoons to analyze the visual representations of President Donald Trump and his responses to six news events during his term in office. Natalia Mielczarek traces the mechanisms through which the drawings construct the presidents image and their potential rhetorical consequences for interpretation. Through this analysis, Mielczarek argues that the right-leaning cartoons largely erase the presidents likeness from their plotlines, acting as a shield against accountability for Trump. Left-leaning cartoons, on the other hand, tend to clone the president and exaggerate his image in most of their stories, often functioning as tools of symbolic censure and punishment. Through these de- and re-contextualization tactics that make President Trump either largely absent or hyper-present in the narrative, the cartoons construct inadvertent rhetorical paradoxes and coalesce around ideological heroes and villains. This result, Mielczarek posits, more closely resembles partisan propaganda, rather than political commentary and social critique. Scholars of communication, political science, and media studies will find this book of particular interest.Natalia Mielczarek is associate professor in the School of Communication at Virginia Tech.

This book expertly shows the important and diverse roles cartoons play in public political discourseespecially during the term of America's most cartoonish president. Travis Vogan, University of Iowa

The Trump Presidency in Editorial Cartoons is probably the most thoroughly researched and intellectually engaging book ever written on one of historys most popular forms of visual political communication. Dr. Mielczarek shows that while there are serious questions about the power and influence of political cartoons, they remain an accurate (and frightening) indicator of the extreme polarization of American politics and America itself. Her comprehenslÃT