The other Trumpian trait that the cartoonist pegged and parodied right away was the salesman’s patter larded with superlatives. This Trump could seemingly buy everything except a sense of self-deprecation. This Trump, in Trudeau’s sardonic vision, was given to ordering up his own Sistine Chapel-style frescoes, only it was The Donald whose finger touched the hand of God. Yet when Trump began to criticize Washington in full-page newspaper ads, positing that he would make a better national leader than the Reagan/Bush-era Beltway losers, Trudeau began fitting Trump for an insightful bespoke debut in his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip.īack then, the leaner, auburn-locked Trump was a satirical target almost entirely because of twin exercises in excess: his gilded acquisitions and the lengths he would go to bask in a limelight. In those early days of the late ’80s, Trudeau initially saw Trump as other New Yorkers did: a consistent glitzy presence in the gossip and business columns, almost a caricature of a real estate titan who wanted to shine brightest along the Manhattan skyline, like a beckoning light along a Gatsby dock. Yet Trudeau, on a stop to promote his latest “Doonesbury”-on-Trump book, was playing it humble. With a wry smile, the artist insisted he was doing little more than reading headlines and meeting deadlines. Trudeau denied any powers of cartoon prognostication, chalking it up to a humorist’s trained response to the news of the day, including Trump’s earlier occasional feints at running for president.

As Garry Trudeau sat on the stage of the National Portrait Gallery this month, the “Doonesbury” creator was asked how his three decades of satirizing Donald Trump have proved so prescient.

#SAD! by G.B. Trudeau