DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - DMZ America Podcast Ep 218: “Interview with Matt Wuerker”

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Tune in to the “DMZ America Podcast” as nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis interview Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Matt Wuerker of “The Politico.” They’ll discuss their own cartoons about the news and issues of the week, as well as those of their peers. Don’t be surprised if the state of the media and cartooning come up as well.Matt Wuerker, born in 1956, is renowned for his incisive, visually rich commentary on the absurdities of power. A graduate of Lewis & Clark College with a BA in 1979, he honed his craft as chief editorial cartoonist for the student newspaper, The Pioneer Log, blending satire with masterful draftsmanship inspired by Saul Steinberg and 19th-century masters like A.B. Frost.Since 2006, Wuerker has been Politico's founding staff cartoonist, his watercolors, cross-hatching, and animated works appearing on front pages and gracing outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Nation. A 2009 and 2010 Pulitzer finalist, he clinched the prize in 2012 for cartoons that "persuade rather than rant," alongside the 2010 Herblock Award for courageous editorial art. Based in D.C. near the National Zoo, Wuerker delights in the "political circus," wielding humor to illuminate truth with minimal supervision.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning into the DMZ America podcast for Friday, October 24th, 2025. Coming to you from the left, I'm editorial cartoonist Ted Raul. And coming to you from the right, I'm editorial cartoonist Scott Stannis. And we are joined by... Joined by Politico Cartoonist, staff cartoonist, Matt Worker. Thank you very much for joining us, Matt. We've been starting this... We were doing this podcast for a few years now,

pushing on, getting close to four. But we finally figured out that we were cartoonists and that probably we should spend more time talking about cartooning and showing cartoons on a show hosted by two cartoonists. So you're like a recent arrival to that change because we're really geniuses here. And so we finally figured that out. And so thanks for joining us.

I'll just read a little bit of bio. If any of this is wrong, blame AI because it generated this biography. You're using AI. Oh, God, okay. Yeah, Matt Worker, a member of the Trilateral Commission. No. He's renowned for his incisive, visually rich commentary on the absurdities of power. The graduate of Lewis and Clark with the BA, he honed his craft as chief editorial cartoonist for the student newspaper, The Pioneer Log.

blending satire with masterful draftsmanship inspired by Saul Steinberg and 19th century masters like A.B. Frost. Worker has been Politico's founding staff cartoonist since 2006. His watercolor crosshatching and animated works appearing on the front pages and bracing many, many outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and The Nation. All of you probably heard of, a 2009 and 10 Pulitzer finalist. He finally clinched the prize in 2012 for cartoons that persuade rather than rant, according to the judges, alongside the 2010 Herblock Award for Courageous Editorial Art. Based in Washington, D.C., what's left of the nation's capital, were delights in the political circus, wielding humor to eliminate truth with minimal supervision.

Might have you been by the new demolished White House East Wing? I have not. I have not. But I plan to go visit this weekend. Apparently it's the biggest tourist attraction in Washington now. I'm not even kidding. That's what I hear. No, no, I'm sure it's something to see. It's definitely something to see. I've seen the aerial photographs.

It's just wild. A little piece of Gaza right next to the White House. The metaphors are just thick. Why should the Palestinians get all the fun? Yeah, right. So, all right. So what we're going to do here is I took the liberty of just pulling up your five most recent cartoons on Politico, and I thought I would just, sorry?

Yeah, great. We just show them, and you can sort of talk about your thinking, you know, like your inspiration, and obviously we might talk a little bit about the issue around them. Scott and I will do the same. Scott and I have both been kind of lazy this week, and we don't, we haven't been very prolific. But anyway, so it'll be mostly yours, but let's go ahead. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I want to jump in real quick.

Ted, I didn't disagree with Ted a little bit. I was at the beach with my grandson. Now, being at a beach house with a two-year-old, that's not being lazy. No, I just want to say. Fair point. All right. Well, here we go. Here comes.

Number one. Okay. Yes. Let me take that in our way. The old haunted house trope. Fun to drop. You guys have done. How many haunted house cartoons have you done?

Oh, Jesus. Over your, yeah. I've been at this for 40 years. It's a lot. At least 40. Yes. But it always works. Yeah.

Go ahead. Sorry, Ted. No, Matt, go ahead. Well, it's because it's so many fun things to draw, right? So much visual appeal. And obviously, it's a good opportunity for people who work in the metaphor form to, like, you know, sort of labeled. different things and you know you can do each direct analogy right it's it's easier it's

it's good that way um so first of all did you do you did you do do you do you do you ever work do you work from um photo references or do you just sort of do it just sit down with a piece of paper and just draw i assume you're not you're still drawing paper i still draw on paper yeah yeah I am an anachronism in that I can work digitally. And when I travel, I work in an iPad with Procreate. But when I, if I have my druthers, I like working on watercolor paper, pin and ink watercolor. I'm way faster in the analog world than I am in the digital world. There's no, there's no undo back button, which is great because once you lay down the wash, it's like, okay, that's purple and you're not going to mess around and go, oh, maybe it should be sepia or something.

The digital world slows me down. This may be too much in the weeds. How big do you work? I work different sizes, mostly 9 by 12. Like here's an example. Okay. Watercolor paper about that big, but I actually happen to have, if I know I'm going to get into the weeds and do something bigger,

I go bigger like that. So people must love your originals, Matt, because they look like the published work, right? It's like with my originals, I draw still by hand also, and, you know, I mean, there, but if you buy an original Ted Raw, you're getting like a black and white, you know, and then I scan. Yeah, and your color goes in in Photoshop or something, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I really love, there's something about the artifact of like an old, this is something from the 17th century or something, you know, an old watercolor sort of thing.

And I sell them, I give them to school auctions, things like that. But there's something nice about having an actual physical piece of art, not just a file on your computer. Yeah. Do you sell them? Yeah. I sell them, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How much are they for people who are watching who want one?

If it's for a good cause, like Cartoonist Rights Network, we try to do fundraising with cartoons. I'll sell them for $600 for the smaller size, maybe $800 for the big one. and there used to be more sort of cartoon auctions and things like that where you could donate it. What if there's an ordinary Joe and Jane Sixpack wants one of your cartoons for their wall? 500 bucks will get you one. Depends.

I mean, you know, the drag is the ones that I really am proud of and sort of go, oh, this one I'm saving for my museum. That's a joke. But inevitably, that's the one that people sort of go, oh, I love that cartoon. And it's like, I don't want to sell that when I'm giving to my ears that they can then sell. Well, I know you're joking, but do you give your work to, because, I mean, I have a relationship with Loyola University in Chicago for most of my Chicago Tribune work. And, I mean, you're a graduate of Lewis and Clark.

And it seemed to me they'd be real interested in having your work in their archives. Yeah, I would think. Possibly. I don't know. You know, I mean, I'm like you guys. I've been doing this for 40 going on 50 years. and I have boxes and boxes of stuff. Yeah.

And they'll take good care of it. Maybe. I don't know. I mean, the weird thing about the craft is that probably 80 or 90% of what I do in a year's time doesn't resonate, doesn't have much resonance. You know, some topics that you bite into are evergreen. And you know that in 20 years or 50 years, people will understand what the issue was. but most cartoons are on the Scaramucci timeline, you know, you do it on Monday, and then the following Monday, people sort of go, yeah, who was that? Why were we upset? So I'm not sure that yeah, yeah, you know, and you can, and also we now live in the world where you can access

everything online. So, yeah. Yeah, I don't know, but, you know, it's, you know, I have a relationship with UT Austin for that stuff. And I don't, I mean, I mean, I, I mean, I, I think what was interesting to me was that they were as interested in my business records as they were in my cartoons. I mean, they wanted originals, of course. But they, you know, they wanted the correspondence. They wanted the syndicate contracts. They wanted to know how much, you know, the paste hubs, how much.

So like someone's studying the business of political cartooning in the future, that, you know, that stuff is important to them as well. Yeah, Loyola was interesting in that. took all my notes and I, you know, I have notebooks and notebooks, you know, fairly copious notes during editorial board meetings and so on. And before I gave it to them, I had to redact a lot of stuff because, Rahm Emanuel would be in there. I said, what a prick. And you just kind of block that out. Thank God that nobody knows how you feel about it. Oh, yeah. You could, it wasn't a leap, but it's just like some of it and like phone numbers and stuff. Okay. Totally weird.

side issue. Can I throw this out at you? Just to show you how strange our profession can be. My brother's name is Kirk, K-I-R-K. And I was doing it. We were, like I said, at the Beach House. So we did a, you know, a video chat with them. And my brother was visiting. My other brother was visiting up there. So I typed in Kirk. I have Charlie Kirk's phone number. No idea how I got it. Yeah, how weird was that? Just, you know, because you know, you type in the name and it gives you that whole list of texts and going well shit i didn't call yeah but just i mean if you get a call from there don't take it it was yeah it took me about an hour to figure out just newly what happened i had spoken when i first got to the tribune in o nine i spoke to a young republican group and he organized

he had to be i'm guessing it has to have been that's how i got the number he organized it wow that's really yeah isn't that creepy though i mean It's just kind of freaky. Anyway, I thought. Halloween story to go with the Halloween card here. All right, let's put up another one of Matt's cartoons here. So. Oh, that's great.

This one was, you know, he just got back from the big trip to the Middle East. I mean, you know, that was just slightly over a week ago, right? Then maybe 10 days ago. I mean, the pace of the news cycle is just nuts. And so this is a good. example of something where it's like okay why did i have him dress up like this and what was he he was he a peacemaker where or whatever and uh you're going to have to attach when i hope speaks for itself 400 word explanation to the back of every cartoon i don't know about this well that's a great

that's a great question to you two guys because the news cycle i mean ted and i were talking about this where you're just on the phone this morning and and talking about how trump's whole strategy is to flood the zone just you know the ballroom the Middle East. Sanctions against Russia. Oh, by the way, I'm going to sue the American people for $200 million. I mean, it just never stopped. But who's killed? Okay. Yeah, 50 million between friends. Does it really matter? But I guess my question to you two guys is how do you manage the flow of this, I mean, of this maniac who is, I mean, like Ted said, flooding the zone. Matt, I mean, what do you, I mean, you draw how many cartoons a week? I do three. I do.

three a week. Used to do four, but I've got... You could do three a day. I mean, completely, seriously. Totally, yeah. I mean, I could not be a good model. I mean, part of me, you know, I would love to be able to create three cartoons or five cartoons a day using my characters in AI.

If I could tell AI, draw this and this in the Ted Rawl using these characters and it's still my work, but just for the art, I conceive of the idea, but it creates it. I think that would actually be the effective way to do it now. I bet you're right. I bet that's coming. I mean, I think that, you know, once everybody adjust to the reality of AI and stuff and the level of productivity it offers, yeah, that could be, we could go back to, I mean, I know some cartoonists to like work overseas, like in countries like Turkey and stuff. And they'll do 12 cartoons a week for different publications. You know, they're simple, they're little one single panel gags or something,

but that's their average output. Yeah. And you could get much, with AI, you could get much more aggressive with the visual style. Yeah, we're just not there yet. You can certainly get it to draw a cartoon quickly, but it just won't look like yours. Yeah, Jeff McNeely, go ahead, sorry. I was just going to say, Jeff McNally famously said, you know, because he's mailed his cartoons, he went strictly syndicate for a while.

He says, it's not like we're trying to deliver, you know, weak old tomatoes. It is, you know, we have the time to luxuriate over the issues. That ain't true anymore. No. No. No, that just seemed to be a Trump. It's a Trump thing. Look, things weren't like that under Biden, and they wouldn't have been like that under

of President Harris either. You know, I've got to think that if and when historians ever get a look at Project 2025, like the notes, like that in that there's files, that they strategize this and that literally they know, for example, on, you know, Friday, October 24th in the first year of the term, we are going to, you know, sue this university. We're going to close this department. we're going to go to war against that country, right? Right. Sorry about that.

Sure. They literally have it all worked out. I think they literally know tomorrow and Sunday. I mean, of course, they respond to, you know, they respond to external stimuli. But basically, they have a list, and they're just like, no, totally. No, and I think that there's sort of, they probably have,

there's the Project 2025 that they actually publishes a book. And then there's Project 2026, Project, Project, 2027, Project 2028, that are great big binders, like you're saying. And they've spelled it out. And then on the wall, they keep a list of crazy red herring shit. Like, okay, let's tear down the east wing of the White House. We can do this. Let's have a contractor standing by.

And, you know, how do we keep the Epstein thing from coming out? A whole list of shit that they can throw against the fan. So I don't, but at some point, I mean, it's, exhausting for political cartoonists and I think it's also kind of there's a fatigue that you can begin to sense and sort of the general population too like what the fuck just sort of let's just do one thing I thought we were doing for instance Middle East peace and that yeah William Shire who is famous for writing the rise of the rise of the third Reich also wrote a lesser known book called Berlin Diaries where he was he was stationed in Berlin as a I forget who he was working for. But anyway, he was fluent in German. He listened to Nazi radio and all that. And, you know, he said that was part of the everyday life in Nazi Germany before the war.

Just that every day there was a deluge of new insanity. Every day, like we're seeing stories, any one of which we're seeing three or five a day that would have been, this one story would have been like a, holy shit for three months or a year story, you know, 10 years. And there's just, and we're just being drowned out. It keeps the opposition on their heels. And, yeah, you know, it's very effective. It's super effective.

And it's a question to you guys, how do you guys, how do you two filter? I mean, how do you decide? Because, Ted, you do three cartoons a week. Matt, you do three a week. I mean, how do you, what, what filter do you use? I mean, what, how do you just? My number one filter for any cartoon is do I have something to say that other people aren't already saying as well or better than I am? If, you know, if I feel like there's a point of view that is unusual, then it needs to be said, I'll try to do it.

I'm also trying these days to try, I think a lot of the commentary about Trump is understandably very bleak and pessimistic. And so I'm trying to do something that I'm, you know, hasn't been something I really did much before, which is to focus more on the absurdity of the whole thing. This is your cartoon here, Matt, it's a great example of that. Like, you know, like, now where was I? It does point out the absurdity. And or to try to like look at it a different point of view. But it's basically, you know, what I care.

It's things that I care about. And it tends to be, I think we're all kind of doing that. Matt, I see that in the stuff that I was looking at from the last month of yours. It's sort of bird's eye view cartoons instead of granular like this bill or that bill, right? It's more like an issue of authoritarianism or to democracy, right? I mean, what about you, Matt? Well, I mean, it's funny. I go back and forth.

I think that Trump could actually, on the one hand, he's a godsend, a great big gift of political cartoonists because it's never been this. juicy. I mean, the outrageous behavior. I mean, I cut my teeth back in high school and college doing stuff about Richard Nixon. And then sort of at post-Watergate, it was sort of like, damn, I missed it. This is like the golden moment in political dysfunction in America, you know, the Conrads and the elephants and those guys. They had the heyday. It'll never be as, the hay will never be this high and the fish will never be jumping this much. or the shit will never be this deep or whatever. And here we are.

We're moving out of the AI plane. Yeah. No, it's, it's funny. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. But I also feel like I was joking about this back in the first Trump administration, where I think he's doing real damage to political cartoonists in that once upon a time, we did have to do stuff that was kind of granular about boring shit.

like tax policy and foreign policy and stuff like that. And with Trump, it's, you know, there's this thing about, like, don't put food out in the campgrounds because the bears come out of the woods and they come down and they eat out of the trash cans and they get fat and lazy and they forget how to feed themselves. And I feel like the same dynamic is happening with political cartoonists where we're eating out of this garbage dump of just crazy-ass scandals. And if we ever got back to like a really boring technocratic president, like a Jimmy Carter or something, it would be, we're all too fat and lazy. We're, you know, chewing on these big fat scandals.

I feel like that kind of happened under Biden where there was like there was, it was kind of like things were pretty slow, pretty boring. And, you know, after four years of Trump, it was kind of like, ah, it's. time to chill but on the other hand there's not much to do yeah right right there weren't big scandals to sink your teeth into and now our problem is that scandals are sort of too big as you were saying it's kind of it's like it's maybe better to go with the absurdity of the stuff and try to point out the absurdity of it than trying to sort of capture this business of you know like this crypto billionaire guy that just got pardon yesterday or something you know there's the levels of corruption that That's a great example.

That's a story that I've heard out. I think that's outrageous. It didn't even cross my mind to do a cartoon about it because I know it's yesterday's news already. It's done. Yeah. It's nothing. I mean, you know, you pick and choose and you're just like,

you know, I was thinking, I literally when that story broke, I thought of Mark Rich. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. That was a big deal, right. No, the bars have been low. Now, that would be nothing.

Yes. Oh, yeah. Trump would be by his grave with his thumb up. Pull up another one of your cartoons, Matt. Yeah, this was, this one will be interesting to see. I don't know how this is going to age. I hope it ages poorly. If it ages well, it means that the Nazi thing will just continue.

But this is based on a political story that came out about the chat group, a telegram group. with a bunch of young Republicans who were going full. I love Hitler. And then Vance came out with this sort of weird flip response, like it was some line about, I refuse to join the Pearl Clutching. You know, boys will be boys. It's locker room talk, that kind of stuff.

Is there anything he won't embrace and say it's okay as long as he gets to be vice president? I'm serious. I mean, I don't know that there's anyone I can think of in my lifetime, that is this big of a political horror than J.D. Vance. I've never seen anything like this. And everyone is buying what he's selling. It's bizarre.

Yeah, he makes Ariana Huffington look principled. Yeah. Matt, I mean, the only, I don't know if I ever told Matt this, but the only time I ever, I worked in Republican politics before I went into editorial cartooning. And the only advanced degree I actually have in my possession is the California Republican party campaign management college and graduated from that and all those rules all the things that we were taught this is the paradigm this is how it works this is how you respond this is what they're

it's it's over i mean none of the dominant paradigms that that drove politics for 30 years of my life of my you know public life my cartooning life none of them apply now and so i go i look at guys like jd bans i you know i look at I look at some of many conservative cartoonists who have been never Trumpers, myself included, because he's not conservative. And it's all of this is just mind boggling and exhausting. Yeah. He's not conservative is the essential thing. He's not, there's nothing conservative about Trump. He's a, he's a, no, his agenda is nothing to do with the traditional Republican, conservative, conservative agenda. But they, meanwhile, they're normalizing this kind of shit. I mean, it's just, it's staggering.

The other thing I do at Politico is every week, I curate a sort of gallery of cartoons from around the country. And the idea is to sort of, I'm not trying to preach to any particular choir. I'm sort of trying to sort of expose people to, here's a range of political opinions and also as a lover of political cartoons. Here's a range of visual styles and kinds of humor. and just sort of celebrate the craft every week. And the problem I have is that, I mean, my remit is to get a broad spectrum of political

cartoons. And the problem is the pro-Trump cartoons are so divorced from reality. I'm not going to platform the cartoons that, you know, are based on the idea that immigrants are eating the cats and the dogs. It's like not true, not going to platform it. And a lot of the sort of, you know, the conservative cartoonists who I do run are doing anti-Trump cartoons, you know, like you Scott and Ramirez. Well, Ramirez was late to the dance, but he's certainly come full out on his argument. I know when he would speak to civic groups and so on, he would say this is, you know, Donald Trump's not a conservative.

And now he's at, and now he also, to his credit, Ramirez is recognizing that the damage that this is doing, not, you know, the ignoring of due process, for instance, and the creation of a national police state and all that stuff. So you have to kind of give him credit. Rick McKee is another example early on. Right. I mean, you can't say we didn't have conservative bona fides. I worked on Nixon. You mentioned Richard Nixon.

I was 13 years old and worked on the re-election campaign, which made me really undatable through most of the junior high school. A good one who owns a T-shirt with Reagan in the image of the format of Che Guevara. Yeah. I mean, I worked on Reagan. I worked on campaigns and worked on those campaigns and was on the Speaker's Bureau for Ford in 76. I mean, which is hilarious because I wasn't old enough to vote. Right.

My point is I have bona fides. I really did work in these areas before I went into editorial cartooning. And I can't tell you how often I get you're not a real conservative. And I get it from some of our cartoonist friends. Mike Lester is a great example, you know, who was loudly proclaiming me not conservative. And then I think he called me trans, if I'm not mistaken. That sounds like Mike. That totally sounds like Mike.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I did a cartoon a while back in the beginning of the same. Trump regime and it was the elephants were showing up and it was the Overton window replacement and there's somebody standing the side saying, you know, I thought that they were shifting, but it's like they've just busted the Overton window and have shifted it over to this all right thing that is now getting normalized back to this cartoon. So strange.

Yeah, no, it is totally strange. I want to jump in real quick on this too, Because I got, in the first Trump term, I actually drew Trump in a brown shirt and a red armband. I'd never, my dad was long, I'll make this very short, I'd bullet pointed it. My dad was in the, was an infantryman in World War II. He was in the division or a platoon

that actually freed Ordruff concentration camp, a camp you probably never heard of, but it was the first one that was liberated by American forces. Wow, he was original, O.G. Antifa. Yeah. So I always...

It's funny to be anti-antifa. I mean, that makes you fuck, right? But my point is that I was always loath to... Because Hitler was Hitler. Nazis were the penultimate image of political and governmental evil. So I never, I almost never used the imagery for that. But then I did for... I drew Trump in a brown shirt with the armband, and I was invited to a friend's house.

for Passover and part of the Passover dinner is to ask questions and they had one of the people at the dinner was like, why did you use that image? Why did you do that? Why would you have used that? I said at the time, it seemed a bit of a stretch, but now are you guys, I mean, did you ever have any compunction about using the brown shirts and the wood armbands? I've had a long argument with Pat Bagley that was one of the first ones to start deploying armbands and swastikas and stuff. And I sort of had a line with the cartoon carousel in Politico, the gallery that I edit where it's like, you know, don't, let's not go Nazi. It's not right. It trivializes what Hitler and the real Nazis were and stuff like that. And I think it's now at this point perfectly

appropriate. So, but I was slow. I mean, Bagley was doing a full Nazi regalia back in 2016, 17. And now he lives in Portugal. So is that fair? I mean, I mean, I studied with one of the leading scholars in the country of, you know, Robert Paxton, who literally wrote the book on fascism, the anatomy of fascism, highly recommended for anyone who really wants to get into the weeds into what exactly fascism is. And anyway, you know, to me it looks like, honestly, it's almost, insulting to Hitler to call Trump a fascist because fascism was a very, you know, it's an ideology.

It's a coherent, cohesive ideology and certainly fascist aspects to Trump. But, I mean, he, to me, he fits into the mold of a classic authoritarian, like a Central Asian dictator, like a, like the, like Sapper Marat Miazov, Turkmenbachi of Turkmenistan, someone like that or maybe Kim go back to the Marcos's or something in the Philippines yeah yeah yeah a family authoritarian with an enterprise an organization right right so the thing is it feels more like that to me right it's like it's about it's about police excessive police it's a police state it's about surveillance it's about intimidating authorities certainly the thing i mean your opponents it's about it's it's about marginalizing and scapegoating certain groups that's all true and then

hysteria over the radical left but it's not but you're not I think it's even I would throw in it's even just this sort of crass pursuit of money I mean I think that it at root with the Trump administration and a lot of what we would call banana republic dictatorships and stuff as you say it's not a coherent ideology it's a means to an end and that end is a family getting really, really rich because they control the state. And, of course, also, isn't it also about an old man reckoning with his mortality by, you know, like, hey, I'll be gone, but my giant fucking ballroom will be there forever. Oh, God, yeah.

Oh, yeah. No, and what's the, there was somebody did a sort of estimation that by the end of this four years of Trump, the Trump family will walk away with $5 billion at a minimum. Jesus. $5 billion, you know, I mean, I don't think this is also. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Right. I find a lot of gold leaves. Right. That'll buy a lot of a doge coin. Well, I was looking at, I mean, I'm talking about Congress. I'm thinking, I mean, all of us have a certain, the three of us and other cartoonists have a certain level of power. But I don't think that's why we do what we do.

We have a voice and we want to express opinion. opinions. I thought you were going to say we do it for the money. It's to get rich. Yeah. Yep. That's exactly at that sweet, sweet cartooning money we all hear about. Yes, exactly. But I'm looking at like the congressman. Why would they hold on? Why are they there? What makes them work? I mean, I'm looking at elections now here in Alabama, where I live, which a million dollar campaigns, which was unheard of, honest to God, five years ago, six years ago. I'm wondering why. Why? Why? are they doing this and it comes down to marjorie taylor green last year made over four and a half million dollars now this is a person who you could generously say is of average intelligence um but four and a half a million she could never that and other members of congress if you looked at the maga trumpies during the state of the union it looked like i you know like a special

Olympics gathering. These guys were clearly idiots, but they're making seven figures. And, you know, the best they could hope for in their regular lives is night manager at a Costco. I mean, seriously, these are profoundly stupid people. But Matt, you're absolutely right when you talk about money. And, you know, a family, like you said, the Trump family is going to walk away with $5 billion. Yeah, that's, there's your motivation right there. I mean, fuck America. Fuck the Constitution, fuck due process, fuck habeas corpus. And, you know, is fascism a distraction? Or is it just sort of like, you know, we're cartoonists? We're being cartoonish. We're just exaggerating. I mean, I'm not above this conversation. I mean, you all know how I drew George W. Bush.

So, you know, I love my Nazi analogies, do them all the time. So, but, I mean, are we going too far when we compare people like Trump to Hitler? Yeah, probably. I agree with the points you were just making. I mean, I think that Hitler was a, a Naziism as a particular virulent form of authoritarian fascism and stuff. But when you look at the stuff that goes on now with like big tech, that's, that's, you know, old school fascism where the, you know, the big plutocrats all get in bed with the government. The government uses the government, the machinery of state to defend. their interest at the expense of the people. I mean, we're heading, there's that part of it, too, that is particularly scary with the onset of AI, the consolidation of the meet. Just today, right?

I mean, just today comes out that comes the news that, you know, I mean, you don't know whether to, I don't know whether to celebrate or to cry. Like, well, you know, Trump was going to go in, send troops into San Francisco for no good reason other than to terrorize the population in a Democratic city. and then it's a

but if the whole thing's called off because a bunch you know Mark Zuckerberg called and said hey Donald really appreciate you'd harsh my vibe down there in the mission district I mean yeah

that's literally it right I mean I don't know what I don't know I mean I'm happy that that's not going to happen but I'm not happy about how it's not going to happen yeah but I would argue that I think bringing up the Nazism is fair game

because if you're conversant with the rise of the Nazis. I'm pretty confident all three of us are. It didn't start as a cohesive plan. Right. He tap dance, put things together as best as we could, improvised, grew programs that seemed okay, killed others that were obviously not working or didn't fall into the plan, his plan. Yeah. He wasn't as greedy. He wasn't as voracious in terms of consumption for personal. For personal gain that Donald Trump is that's where people around him were but yeah yeah no no no it's sort of like reminds me of George Wallace here in Alabama people forget he George Wallace died in a

three-bedroom two-bedroom two-bedroom two-bedroom track right he right but his brother died in a mansion so it's like Hamid Karzai you know everyone around it was corrupt as shit but he wasn't right yeah so I don't know I think I think we've reached the point where the Nazi symbolism is apropos. I think it's a... And also, let's face it, how many Americans... We have to use references, and especially you guys who traffic in symbols and metaphors, you have to use symbols and metaphors that the American reader will understand and read. Meaning, if you're comparing them to, you know, Chichescu,

you know, who? Yeah, right, right. What? Yeah. Even if you compare him to Who's in Hungary And I always forget his name And Ted always helps

Yeah I mean you do that in a cartoon American audiences are going to go I bet fewer than 5% of the American public Asked on the street Even offered 20 bucks Tell me who Victor Orban is Yeah no no completely

Yeah Yeah So all right Let's look some more cartoons Because that's fun And, you know, they're good. Here we go. Oh, so this is, I'm sorry, I have to say this is, this is, oh, oh, damn it.

Go the other way. Kill the other way. I'm going to get out the old ones. Oh, God, Ted. Okay. We. Oh, there we go. Okay, cool.

Then, of course, there's a poop reference from the AI airplane dropping poop on the no King's process. Oh, I love that. No, this one was a good example of trying to keep up with the new cycle. So I actually sketched this out and inked it and it was sitting on my drawing table for like a week. And I had the word fear and fantasies over in the corner there. And then the No Kings weekend, he posted the insane fighter jet with diarrhea. And it was like, oh, great. This will sort of round it out even better. So I stuck that in there. But you can't keep up. If you didn't work at a so-called family newspaper, would you have made it shit instead of poop? Probably, although I never really worked for a family newspaper, so I didn't have to worry about that.

Poop is funnier, too, don't you think? It is funnier. It's a funnier. It's a good. Hey, Matt, I got to ask you about your Uncle Sam costume because I always render him with a blue jacket and the striped pants. You've gone, you've gone, you've gone rogue here, my friend. You have the striped jacket in the striped jacket. He has a striped jacket.

He definitely, you're the one that's gone rogue. The blue jacket is some other weird thing. We'll have to go back and look at like that. Yeah, look at him like on reflag. It's different. Well, he also, he does the one big star in the band of the hat. And some of us do the ring.

I do. I do the ring of stars too. Yeah. This is one of, I forget who came up with it. They were putting together, I think it was for the NCS even. They had a panel, a faux panel that said, oh, oh, versus, uh-oh, the controversy rages on. Hifen or not to hyphen? That's awesome.

I'm sorry. Yeah. Whoever's watching us going, what the fuck are they talking about? Another one here. Oh, shit. I do not understand what. Oh, here. It's, this thing is so weird. Okay. There it is. Yeah, this one, this one, this one I just put up yesterday. Trojan horse. Trojan horse mixing my metaphors. It's a little bit confusing. But this is cool. Thank you. Thank you. See, watercolor is fun. You can do stuff with ambient light and things like that.

I've, you know, when you're learning watercolor, which I guess I never learned. I learned, I went through learn. I went through the gerund phase and never got out of it. It's so hard to control. Do you ever, do you still, I mean, you've been doing it for years, but do you ever fuck up and like just sort of, ah, fuck, all my, everything got smudged. Sometimes, but that's the beauty of a deadline. You just sort of, you live with your fuck up. So you sort of go, oh, that should have been more purple or something.

But you don't, you don't have time to start over, whatever. And like I said earlier, too, I, when I travel, I work on an iPad with procreate. It's got beautiful watercolor effects and stuff like that, but the problem is that you can undo everything and go back and you can do the same work the sky three different ways and pick the one you want. And there's a certain, what's the word beauty, simple-mindedness to like, you lay it down, it stains the paper, it's what you're working with. It's kind of, it speeds you up. Matt, this is, by the way, where you're crosshatching style, like this kind of image, this. particularly, you're sort of like, it kind of, it, like, you know, wants this kind of drawing style, you know. It does. Yeah. Yeah. No, it adds something to it. Although there's very few of us crosshatchers left. I don't know.

It's going the way of the daughter. It's kind of used to be a crosshatcher. Not so much anymore. Well, because I know the devices that people are looking at these things on, I made it much simpler outline, but I still throw in some crosshatching in there. It's still. Sometimes. Yeah. There's always the residual crosshatching. But like, so did you, would you have gotten any shit from your editor over, you know, the, are you saying the Republican Party is Nazi? I have a really sweet deal at Politico in that I don't have any adult supervision. I mean, Politico started 19 years ago and I was part of this little crew of 40 people

when they started it up and they had the brilliant idea that they should have a staff cartoonist so they hired me and for the first six months maybe I would show sketches it was the first staff job I'd ever had I was strictly a freelancer before that

and so at age 50 I'm dealing with editors and I would take them sketches for the first six months and then finally Jim and John just sort of said you know what we're really really busy and we got a lot of irons in the fire. And our wives say your stuff is great. So don't show us sketches. It gives us plausible deniability, a great, which is actually kind of brilliant, you know. I mean, it's a very

Washington kind of tactic. It doesn't stop the New York Times, Matt. No, I know. I know. I know. Exactly. Well, that's their thing. Even if you didn't draw at the New York Times, even if you don't draw the cartoon, you could be fired over it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, God, don't start us on the fucking New York Times. And what Patrick Chappod got fired for a Portuguese cartoonist, right? What he drew. And, yeah, but my, anyway, my deal with Politico is that the only, if I know I'm going to, like, step in it or something, I'll talk to John Harris and say, you okay with this. But they don't kill them.

And when I have stepped in it, their plausible deniability thing is, oh, shit, that's Matt. He didn't show us the sketch. yeah, that's a little rough, but that's not the way we work, and I didn't approve it. So in this case, the only editor that I deal with is my copy editor, who's a good friend, and he corrects my hyphens and my ellipses and my spelling. So it's a very sweet deal. And with this one, it's like that one just went up yesterday. And you've had nothing killed. I haven't had anything killed in 18 years. I did it. a cartoon about Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General for George Bush, as a piñata. And I thought it was culturally appropriate. And my editor at the time said, no, let's not do the Latino guys. A little too culturally appropriate.

Well, but again, it was like, okay, fine. That was a game. That was silly. But no. I have not. Nice. I did have the ADL come after me for a cartoon I did about Gaza, a little over a year ago. And they accused me of being an anti-Semite.

Oh, Sean. Yeah, no, I know. Well, they were very strategic in that we're, Politico is now owned by a big German conglomerate. We're owned by Axel Springer out of Berlin. And the Germans are, you know, for some reason, very sensitive about being called anti-Semites. Yeah, I wonder, why. Is there a context here? There's something that was remembering. Yes. There's that giant German conglomerate that, like, they never criticize Israel. Is that the same one?

That's the same one. And if you're a German employee of Axel Springer, that you sign a pledge where you support the state of Israel, they didn't do that to Politico in the U.S. And frankly, they've been great. They've been, I've had no editorial interference whatsoever. When the ADL started the campaign saying, fire, your anti-Semitic cartoonist, our parent company in Berlin were great. they said that's an editorial decision for the U.S., and they stood behind the cartoon. So, you know, they took a lot of flack for it, but they've been great. So no editorial interference whatsoever.

Wow. Let's turn over to some of Scott's work here. Oh, God. Why? He's the worst. All right, here we go. Yeah, this was just the gambling scandal that's exploding right now. And B, I mean, this is one of those place-setter cartoons because,

it doesn't say much other than hey guys this happened you said it's nothing wrong with that no yeah there is I mean there is and there isn't if you don't have a long term plan and the plan is this is going to tear up because this scandal is not just the NBA it's also going to major league baseball which did not get the headlines the last couple of days and it's going to go the idea that this was the concept of why you can expand gambling now in America is that you can't have the black Sox, the scandal of 1990, where the White Sox through the World Series, because these guys make

so much money that they will never be prone to blah, blah, blah. Well, I said, really? Have you seen these guys? Math, not their strong suit. And can they really make enough money? Well, they make a lot of money, but they make it for a short time that might even be shorter. I don't, they don't understand that either. That's why so many professional athletes buy these ginormous houses instead of socking that half of the $50 million someplace else.

They don't, money is, I mean, look at Don King. Remember him, the boxing promoter. He always said he could, and he was right, and he did it. He got fighters, he said, I could offer them a check for $3 million or a briefcase full of $50,000. Every time. they would take the $50,000 because in their minds, that's real money. But those are people who've also suffered a lot of traumatic brain injury. Well, football players don't. I mean, you know, my point is that this is going to be a massive scandal and it's going to show the folly of the expansion, the willy-nilly expansion of gambling in this country. You know, you have an app. They advertise during, I'm sorry, I mean,

I'm not a prude. I think that human beings, I'm a libertarian, have a right to be stupid. but like fan zone has commercial saying you can now you know bet now on what the next play will be right I mean yeah well I lived in it does come back to personal experience it's the sports gambling version of derivatives exactly exactly well I was just when you do a deep dive into what happened in 2008 and how much of the American economy is based on gambling that's all this is 100% yeah yeah that part's funny right like it's all debt you know not people aren't like my father 93 years sorry 97 years old never has owned a credit card never took out a home mortgage never borrowed money to buy a car he was like if you don't have the money you can't afford it and you know that

worked for him but if everybody did that you know we wouldn't have a we wouldn't be expecting a 3% increase in GDP it's all debt it's all a house of car Social Security is going to get a bump this this year next year to 2.8% increase in Social Security. Okay, Ted, this is going to piss you off, pinning the Mom Donny on the donkey. The mainstream. No hammer? That's coming. Exactly.

I, you know, Mom Dani is, I think, a fascinating personality. First of all, he's winning on personality because the guys he's running against her. not great guys. And it's going to be interesting. In Chicago, we elected Brandon Johnson, who is a progressive Democrat. And he is fucking it up so badly. Within two years of his swearing in, he's already a billion dollars in debt. That takes some doing.

That's a level of incompetence that, you know, you don't see it just every day. And for me, this is one of the few times my conservativeness can come out and say, Listen, social Democrat doesn't generally work, especially in an American economy that's based on growth, innovation. And so that's that, I'm explaining the cartoon, but that's the cartoon. But the cartoon, Scott seems to be saying, I mean, fortunately I have the cartoons here to prove me right or wrong, is that the Democratic Party, you know, is in danger of being tarred with over. overall as a socialist left wing or radical left party. And just because the mayor of New York, I mean, he is going to win, is going to be, I'm going to vote for him tomorrow, is going to, is, you know,

it's just because one guy happens to become the mayor of the city of New York, really can really sell the idea that like tens of thousands of Democratic Party office holders across the country are also a bunch of commies no because i'm saying what i'm saying is that they're trying to say that the democrat that the donkey the democratic party is social democrats now and which may may happen um no they're gonna yeah red baiting is a fine american tradition when it yes well that's exactly matt exactly that's that's what i'm saying is that these guys now the republicans are going to point to this guy and say this is the Democratic Party, even though it's just one guy, Albert, a very high profile, important job in

the country. I mean, it's not, you know, he's not the mayor of, you know, Birmingham. This is the mayor of New York City. And the mayor of the city of New York has more power than he used to. Is that right? Notably, he controls the schools now, which he didn't use to. And, you know, that's a major power base. There's a million students in New York City public schools. But the Democratic Party is in terrible shape right now. who loves politics. Let's just ignore, you know, right, left, you know, any of that stuff. I just like good, solid, smart politics. And it seems to me that the Democratic Party could embrace this guy and say he's part of our big tent. Because the Republicans are what they should do.

That's what the Republicans would do. No, no, no, they're not. As we went to, I don't know, we can't say press, as we went to pod today, literally an hour ago or so. Hakeem Jeffries finally endorsed Zoran Mamdani. The election starts tomorrow. Early voting starts tomorrow. And he's in the New York delegation, right? Jeffreys is from Brooklyn. And he finally got around to like, okay.

I mean, really? I mean, yeah, look, here's the thing. Progressives, you know, are already feeling, you know, spicy and burnt over what happened to Bernie Sanders, and not once but twice, this is just more of the same for them. I mean, this is why a lot of progressives, especially young progressives, don't show up to vote. They're not going to vote for Trump, but they're not going to vote for corporate Democrats,

and especially because they're always told, right, we're always told, vote blue, don't matter who, like, even though you might be to the left, I might be to the left of, of like the corp of kathy hokel we have to vote for her because you know she's a because she's a democrat we're all democrats but then somehow when one of ours finally gets it you know gets the gets the big gets the nod then it's like fuck that person they have to be stopped well that's true and the democrat party now has this massive opportunity and just it makes my teeth it's so fucking stupid they have this big meaty middle where they could say there's room in our party for Mom Donnie. There's room for our party for pro-business Democrats. I have a button

up on my bulletin board in my kitchen. Believe it or not, from the 1988 Republican Convention is Republicans for Choice. Yes? They were, that was a thing. And I always challenge people, read the 1976 Republican Party platform. It's short and it'll blow your frigging mind. The EPA below. Yeah, but the 76 platform supports the ERA. It also talks about liberalizing small L immigration. It talks about being controlled. I don't know. This is the idea that you want ladies to have equal rides? Well, there's that. Was it Scandinavia? No, but I think the thing that you're both pointing to in both different parties is this question of

the big tent and how you construct a big tent. And the Democrats have lost that. And the Trump, administration i think is managing to uh to blow up the republican big tent there's more and more never trumpers the more cruelty and bullshit that he engages in there is as you say scott a big fat middle that somebody could embrace and i mean and to argue the other side of the equation i think that the democrats did probably lose a lot of independence with a lot of the culture war stuff You know, and they're dialing back. They're like talking about trans rights all the time. They're having to dial back DEI programs that if you work in a big corporation

and you're going to racial sensitivity training and shit like that. They lost a lot of people that could have been in that big tent. And they just need to sort of dial it back toward the center, I think, is the thing. And I think that's what went wrong with Harris in her campaign, right? She should have just run, but she ran as a black woman first and foremost. Yes. I mean, seriously, it was like, literally it was like the election was about her, or at least she thought it was. Her campaign was about her. You know, literally, I'm with her. She resurrected the Hillary Clinton. You know, that was a winner. It's like, no, no, no, the whole point is you're supposed to be with us. Elections are about us. Let's put in, let's put in another one of Scott's cartoons. Oh, do we have to go up there? So Scott does a comic strip called Prickley City. Go ahead.

This one, I'm really proud of this week because, and I like this line. This is the character saying, this is not the America we wanted. And the other character says, but maybe it's the America we deserve. And I just, I love that thought that, you know, this is not my America. Well, you didn't, you know, 11 million Democrats, fewer Democrats voted in 2024 than voted in 2020. I mean, so whose fault is it? I mean, it's the people who, this is what we deserve. Well, you could also argue that it's the people who voted, you know, the Republicans who voted for Trump, right?

We assume you have to do that. They were going to. We knew that they were going to. A quick story, Matt, I'll share with you real quick. When I was working here in Birmingham, I was approached just about the time I got the offered the job at the Chicago Tribune. I was offered to run for statehouse here. The Republican Party approached me to do that. And I said, well, I've got this thing in Chicago.

thank you um so then after 10 years i came back to birmingham and i said i had i had lunch with with a person who's deeply involved in this stuff i said so is that opportunity still available and she asked he says couldn't you out trump your opponent i go of course not she says you then you don't have a chance right and just a decade the changes that have happened and so you talk about the tent and the tent is extremely tiny on the republican side it's not policy the time. Yeah. It's swearing fealty to the fear, you know, to the fearless leader. And here I always in my, you know, I try to do a little pogo asking that I anthropomorphize some characters. So how is Prickley City supposed to work without Winslow, sir, who's been laid off? He says, what's a Winslow? And

says, the coyote cub. He's half the team here. He says, is he one who gold plates my stuff? She goes, no. And he's not essential. I mean, I'm sorry. Looking at the old office, just that alone, he should be impeached. I mean, it looks like a French whorehouse. It does. It does. People wonder why gold has gotten so expensive. It's because Trump's buying it all up to like, do you have any idea how you remove gold leaf? I mean, do you or do you just paint over it? I don't, when the next, assuming there's another. It must be worn off like Trump's tongue. Oh, ew, ew. Yeah. Although it's a great cartoon trope. I mean, the gilded sort of background in the Oval Office and stuff.

For all of our high-minded talking about comparing the moment to this current moment to Weimar Republic or something like that, the thing that I keep feeling is that we're living in that shitty 80s movie, Back to the Future, where we're living in that dystopian version. Oh, yes, back to the future too, right? Back to the future when everything goes wrong and there's the megalomaniacus, the big casino, and all of this stuff is just, it's all there in the movie. It was very, very prophetic, I thought. Yeah, I should watch that again. I watched it when it came out.

Let me, can I ask you guys one political question here? Bill Maher is convinced there won't be an election in 28. As you and me. So is Steve Bannon. Well, that's my point. Will there be? An election, as you and I would consider a free and open election. I think all the signs are pointing to a complete shit show.

I mean, the redistricting and all the stuff, and we're going to have 200,000 ice agents spread around the country watching polling places and stuff. It's just a complete shit show. And that's, so that's even assuming it's just a deeply flawed election, but an election nevertheless. I mean, Bill Maher's assuming no election, right? Like, I mean, look, I don't think anyone can really put past Donald Trump, you know, the idea of, you know, capitalizing on a national emergency real or imagined to have an excuse not to leave off.

He's quite good at imagining or conjuring national emergencies, right? Yes. Would you leave, Matt? Would you leave the country? I know we talk about bad. has moved to Portugal I've considered it we've had we've dedicated a whole show in fact to would we leave would you not I don't I don't think so no uh-uh why not I don't know where I'd go my Spanish sucks I've lived overseas before I lived in Spain way back when

in a previous life and no I don't know no I think you stay and fight and yeah it'd be a shame if everybody just sort of pulled up move to Canada although I I don't, I mean, in Bagley's case, he was pressing and was talking about this 10 years ago. So I don't know if you get out early enough. But at this point, no, I think that, you know, good people dig in and invite this stuff. Would you be worried about your personal safety? That's what Scott and I think about more. It's not about, like, making some kind of statement.

Nobody gives a shit where Ted Roller or Scott's a dentist lives. Yeah, no, no, or what Matt Worker's drawing. No, no, I agree. I agree with that part. I get threats. I get threats all the time. I had one of those creepy pieces delivered to my house that I didn't order, which somebody told me is like a thing that the alt-right people like to do to spook people and shit.

So, but no, I mean, to Ted's point, the frustrating thing is I wish I had more threats. I wish that the cartoons had more at stronger effect or whatever. And the thing that I feel... I can forward you my threats. You can have them. Oh, good. Oh, good. It's not that I want the threats, it's not that I want the threats.

It's that the threats indicate that you're having some sort of effect. And more and more, I just feel as cartoonists, we're just pissing in this ocean of noise and, you know, AI generated shit and memes and all that kind of stuff. I mean, once upon a time, the Herblocks and the Conrad's, you know, what they drew, people were paying attention to and we're just we're so drowned out in the current media landscape that it's when you were cutting your teeth on richard nixon as a young man um do you both of you do you guys think that if the media environment the landscape looked more like 1973 uh you know and like print newspapers really fucking mattered and the sunday paper made a noise when it hit the front

door and an editorial cartoonist could really fucking scare a congressman. Yeah, yeah. Like, do you think Donald Trump and his minions would have been able to, you know, make, get as much done and intimidate the Democrats and basically, would we be where we are now? I don't think so, but that was such a different era. It was such a different era. You know, I mean, it's a cliche to talk about, you know, everybody watched the three big networks, you know, everybody in Chicago read the Chicago Tribune.

Everybody in L.A. read the L.A. Times. And you had sort of singular voices on these singular platforms that had a lot of power. Paul Conrad was the only cartoonist to make Nixon's enemies list because he was drawing Nixon going back to when he was a congressman in California. Actually, Herblock made the first list. and it pissed Conrad off. Did he? Yeah. It didn't take much to piss Conrad off. Let's be clear.

But Conrad was on the second list, which really pissed him off. But, yeah, there were two cartoons. Yeah, Herblock was on. Don't forget, Herblock did that famous cartoon when Nixon was a vice president coming out of the sewer. Oh, fuck yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was enough for. I will not step down.

All right. I stand corrected. I'm sorry. If you guys don't mind, I'll put up a couple of mine. What? How do you think you are? Just the guy who runs the stream yard. And not very well, apparently. Your lighting is quite good, Ted, though. That's good lighting. Well, right now, that's the sun from God.

The window faces south. So, yay, God. All right. So anyway, I just thought this, I thought it was important to sort of, you know, I heard, I often react to things that people say online. And I wanted to make this broad point about how, you know, like, well, he'll get rid of ice. Like, for example, oh, when the Democratic president comes in, he'll tear down that god awful, like, you know, ballroom. And not really. I mean, there's a tendency to keep a lot of shit. I mean, look, Don, and this cartoon came out of a personal experience. I went to the post office and things were really fucked up. And I was like, oh, right, is that

asshole that Trump appointed still postmaster general? That's right. He's still there. And Biden kept him there. And it's like, so it literally was just sort of like, just a reminder, like don't think that getting rid of Trump is

going to solve our problems here. Right? Like we need to get rid of Trump. Yes. But you know, there's underlying, there's There's a sort of, and there's a sort of a tendency for regimes to just sort of like, oh, we'll build this giant domestic police force like ICE. There's a tendency for regimes to repurpose and keep them. The Pentagon never shrinks.

You know, the military budget never goes down. Peace dividend never happened. You know, that kind of thing. The thing with ICE, though, is that I think ICE is a wholly different thing. I mean, have you noticed that the Prad Boys have gone. away, you know, the proud boys, the Oathkeeper. It's because they've all joined ice.

Yeah. I don't, I mean. There was an article. I forget where it came out, but it was like someone was saying that like that they said that like the standards are really they had to drop the standards because somebody like fucking idiot like mook criminals are joining ice.

Yeah, no, I talked about this. They're goons. They're goons. They're steroid up, you know, jacked up goons. I mean, There's a picture of an ICE agent from Chicago, and I wrote to my editor saying, you know, this guy, I looked at what he was wearing. It's kind of a typical cartoonist thing that we would record look at what he was wearing versus the horror of the picture. And he wasn't wearing a stitch of government issued anything. This is all shit you can buy.

Face covered. Yeah, his bulletproof vest, the whole thing. And he's wearing a T-shirt that was a giveaway at a Texas Rangers game. And I, you know, I said this is, we should do a story on this in the Chicago Tribune. I mean, this Chicago Tribune was like, we don't have the reporters to do that. It's like, wow. And it goes on and they hire more and this again become sort of normalized. I mean, the idea that they're running around in unmarked vans covering their faces and kidnapping people who, who disappear into this private prison archipelago complex, you know.

And that's the fear. that Ted and I talk about, we've talked about on this podcast. I'd like to get your take on it, Matt, is that, you know, they show up at your door. They arrest you. And we're thinking, well, I'll go through the courts and surely the courts will eventually free me. Well, you all of a sudden, Matt, you're two and a half years in a Ugandan prison. Yeah, right. That's what I want to avoid. Or even, or even two months in Louisiana in some private facility where, you know, you're not given due process at all. I mean, it's outrageous. It's absolutely outrageous. And the sad thing, again, getting back to blaming people for this or whatever,

where are the grown-ups in the U.S. Congress? I mean, Nixon, there was a Republican Party that went to Nixon and went, you know what? You're over the line. You're out. Sorry, we can Don't worry, the two ladies senators who always say they're going to do something and never do. Collins and Murkowski will be there for us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to put up something not cartooning related first, and then before I put up another one of mine.

Here, Scott sent this to me. This is this actual tweet slash X from the current U.S. Department of Labor. Yeah. Um, thoughts? Well, apparently the American dream is only for white males with weirdly AI rendered hair. If you look at it, but it's just, and if you look at, was it you Ted who pointed out that the church is white? The house is white. Everything in there is right. Yeah. I mean, this is something that would have been very much at home in 1937 in Berlin. I was, I was just about to use the old Molly Ivan's line about it. It was, it was.

even better in the original German. Isn't that astounding? I mean, that was a tweet from yesterday. I mean, this is... From the government. Yes. Well, or the one that ice raid that they did in Chicago

where they used Black Hawk helicopters and they brought in a film crew so they could turn it into sort of a top gun montage sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's all, this is part of their project 20, 25 thing. We're going to instill so much fear

that self deportation will be a real thing, and we're going to just use every propaganda tactic that they can possibly use. They are insane. And I have one more of mine. I want to inflict upon you guys. Oh, shit. See, this is the thing. I believe it or not, I am not that retarded. I really do. Click on the right thing, but Stream Yard is squirrely. Do you, do you edit these? Do you can edit this out? I will probably just leave it in because, you know, it's all part of the joy of doing this. It's authentic. It's authentic. I mean, that is how I feel, right? I mean, it's sort of like.

at a certain point can you is it is it normal to be patriotic when your country and your government does so much shit and you can't really say it's just the government because there's no resistance i mean i was thinking about the no kings rallies right setting aside like the execution of it i'm not even to get into that here um Donald trump is every day all day right no kings is every three months on a Saturday. No wonder it's winning. No, I'm actually, you know, living in Washington, D.C., I'm shocked that there aren't daily big demonstrations of all the federal workers who've lost their jobs. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Or some of these unions organizing like a general strike or something of some sort saying, I mean, there's European countries, there would be a million people

on the streets with this level of cruelty going on. Yeah, but we don't have that tradition. And now, thanks to ice, people are really afraid to go out and get beat up or tear gasped. I won't lie. I'm afraid of it. I mean, I was very proud of my fellow New Yorkers a couple days ago when there was an ice raid on Canal Street in Lower Manhattan. And some spontaneous New Yorkers warned the targets to run away.

Other New Yorkers yell at ice. Other New Yorkers threw. stuff at ice. It was like yay, New York City. Like, we can't let Chicago have all the fun. But I can't say that I would have thrown anything at them at all. I would have run away. I might have warned the guys.

That I might have done. But I'm not going to stick around to the ball with fucking psychopaths. You wouldn't have run down to Subway and got a sandwich and thrown it on them? It's like I always felt bad for them. sandwich. Like, Subway sandwiches can be pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Man, you lost a good sandwich. There were people out at the No Kings March here in Washington that were just instead of placards, they were holding Subway sandwiches. I hope they ate them later. Yeah, I think maybe they did, but they figured we can just make it. It's a political statement. Matt, you're one of the last

of the Mohicans. You're one of the last staff cartoonists left in the United States. When I got in there were hundreds and hundreds. And now it's down to low double digits at most, maybe down to single digits. Are you, you know, so how do you, to what do you attribute that? I mean, I'm really happy for it. But like, you know, like, I mean, obviously they see value in what you do. Do you have any advice for cartoonists who are trying to pitch, you know, an editor in my and say, like, you know, what do you say to an editor to explain why?

you know, we bring readers and why the form is still, you know, relevant and useful. Yeah, I wish I could talk to more editors about it. I mean, first of all, it was dumb luck in my case. I was, I think I mentioned this. I was 50 years old when I got the job starting at Politico. And it was, I approached them as a freelance client, and Marty Tulchin was staffing up this new experiment in news media. and he had the archaic notion that of course we have a staff cartoonist so i got hired um but we were

launched in 2007 and that was the beginning of the smartphone the iPhone the iPhone came out in 2007 twitter facebook the social media were basically born in 2007 2008 and the very smart people that i worked for at politico understood that there was this big shift happening from newsprint from daily newspapers and it was eventually going to be on these smartphones and on social media and and you know we may be an archaic art form or an archaic form of political opinionating but we're perfect for the short attention span era that we live in i mean you know going back to the thomas nasts and people like that cartoons communicate with people who are maybe not even literate but they can figure out something from a sharp caricature or a picture or whatever and the social media

stuff in the beginning with Politico was really big at establishing the brand and we used cartoons and you know various things to get people's attention because we sort of understood or figured that the wind was blowing that way and we tacked into it and and the cartoon carousel thing that we do every week it gets some every week it gets between one and a half two million views on the site. It usually leads the traffic at Politico. And I just, I don't understand why other publications, some, some are starting to do it a bit more. Like even the Washington Post, it's interesting to see where, you know, Ann stepped away, Antelan stepped away a year ago from the post. And a lot of us were worried that the post was going to just drop

cartoons entirely. And they're now regularly using cartoons. They're, they're starting to push them much more on social media. I think that any savvy platform should understand that a political cartoon is a great way to grab people's attention. Maybe stir up some controversy. That can also work

in a publication's favor. Yeah, yeah. So it's a, we may be an old, old art form, but we're still really right for the moment. And back to like the beginning of the conversation like you were saying that with AI tools, people can start to produce stuff and they don't even have to hire some weird weirdo like us who draws with their hands. If you have a good idea and you've got mid-journey or some of these AI graphic generators, you can start to

generate your own stuff. There's problems with that, but I also think that it will continue to exist in one form of the other. The trick to finish my, my, long rant is figuring out how you monetize it. And I think that's true for any kind of creative, artistic person. My son is a rock and roller and plays in a couple of bands. And big tech has done the same thing to music that it's done to cartooning and the media in that it takes all the money for itself. And it makes it really easy to find a community and get people to like appreciate you and interact with you. But then the trick is, can you make a living doing that?

And you can't eat interaction, unfortunately. So the trick is figuring out ways to bring back the idea that you pay for artistic content, and that way the creators can make a living. So. Matt, thank you so much for joining us here. Yeah, thank you. It's been awesome, and please hope you'll come back.

Sure, any old time. Matt Worker of the Politico, Pulitzer Prize winning, cartoonist, check him out. Check out the, what's the Roundup called? It's called the cartoon carousel. It's very catchy, isn't it? Check out the cartoon carousel that's got alliteration and everything. We will be back next week.

We're trying to move towards a more regular schedule, a more frequent schedule. We're going to try to hash that out by the end of the month, hopefully. You're watching DMZ America with Ted Rawl and Scott Stannis. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks, guys. Bye. Thanks. Thanks, Matt.

Scott, this is your turn. Tia P-up a song. I don't know. Oh, my goodness. You caught me off guard, Ted. I totally, totally screwed the pooch on this. I apologize to everybody listening. That's totally so.