[imagesource: Evan Vucci/AP]

I haven’t had to write about President Donald Trump in a while, and it’s been a pleasure.

But here we are, so let’s see what Donald has been up to this week.

Despite having dragged his heels for months with regards America’s coronavirus response, he sprung into immediate action when Twitter dared to flag one of his tweets as “potentially misleading”.

Donnie signed an executive order targeting social media companies, saying he did so to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history”.

Funny, because at the same time, this champion of free speech was also trying to remove a satirical cartoon from being sold online.

The Guardian reports:

The Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Nick Anderson has described Donald Trump as an “adolescent wannabe authoritarian”, after the US president’s re-election campaign failed to pull one of Anderson’s cartoons mocking Trump’s inaccurate suggestion that injecting disinfectant could protect against Covid-19.

Anderson put his cartoon The Trump Cult up for sale on the online retailer Redbubble this month…The cartoon is a reference to the 1978 Jonestown massacre, where more than 900 people died after drinking cyanide-laced punch at the order of cult leader Jim Jones, and to Trump’s widely denounced idea of injecting bleach to protect against coronavirus

If you’re unfamiliar with the Jonestown massacre, see here.

Anderson’s comic below, which clearly struck a nerve:

Accurate.

Redbubble first pulled the cartoon after a trademark infringement claim made by Trump’s campaign organisation, Donald J Trump for President Inc., before free speech organisations entered the fray.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) and others defended Anderson’s cartoon, which saw Redbubble once again upload it for sale on the platform:

In a statement, Anderson praised Redbubble for recognising the error, but said there were some “troubling issues” raised by the affair, including that the cartoon was removed less than 24 hours after he posted it, before he had received a single order.

“I doubt anyone had even seen it yet on the site,” he said. “This reveals that the Trump campaign has a system in place, trawling for material they find objectionable. If it happened to me so quickly, it likely has happened to others. How much other content has been removed this way on Redbubble and other sites?”

Again, the world’s tiniest ego in action.

The next meltdown is sure to be just around the corner.

[source:guardian]