The Art Of Politics: Saying Goodbye To 2024 With December’s Political Cartoons
by Richard Bruton
The worlds greatest political cartoonists are always capable of skewering politicians perfectly, taking current events and summarising them perfectly in a single piece of art – it’s the Art of Politics.
A little bit of Christmas? And a happy New Year?
December sees a slew of Christmas cartoons and some looking forward (bleakly) to 2025… it’s certainly very Trump focused…
Matt Davies has one possible answer to the mystery drones over New Jersey thing…
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OVER IN THE U S OF A…
President-Elects Trump & Musk take power early?
Lots of worrying developments as the US gets ready to greet its new President. Although there’s plenty pointing out that cut-rate Bruce Wayne, Elon Musk, is the money and the power behind Donnie’s throne…
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A vision of Trumpian policies…
Trump keeps promising he’s going to hit the ground running, with sweeping policies around getting rid of environmental policies, mass deportations of illegal immigrants (and their legal families if that’s what it takes), a range of tariffs that only Trump seems to think are going to be good news for the US consumer, and plenty more to give the world nightmares…
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The Trump cabinet nominations keep raising eyebrows…
The orange one just keeps doubling down on his cabinet and high-level appointees, so many of them absolutely unqualified for the job he’s putting them into…
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Biden goes out with a whimper and plenty of pardons…
Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s final days in office were going to be quiet, that is until he decided to pardon his son, Hunter. Sure, any parent can see why he’s done it, but the use of the presidential pardon by a Democratic president to pardon his convicted son has just left the way open to a certain Mr Trump to get away with most anything he wants…
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Murders in America / Anger in America…
As usual, as with every month, the number of shootings and school shootings kept racking up dead innocents in America. As usual, it’s left to The Onion to roll out the headline it always uses… ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
And that’s the perfect summation of the problem. America just doesn’t want to do anything about the gun problem. And the bodies keep mounting up. (For more on the Onion headline – Wikipedia, Guardian)
But there was a very different kind of shooting this month, as Luigi Mangione shot and killed UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive Brian Thompson in New York City on 4 December. Mangione’s trial will be a media circus in 2025. But the killing has brought the issue of US healthcare into focus. According to much of what’s been written on it, Mangione was allegedly motivated by resentment at what he called “parasitic” health insurance companies. And that’s struck a chord in America, where mounting anger at health insurance companies continuing refusals to cover Americans who’ve been paying crippling amounts of money into the system is threatening to boil over.
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Farewell President Carter…
President Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the USA, passed away on 29 December 2024 at the age of 100.
His single term was marked by economic strife and controversy in his failures to deal with the Iran hostage crisis (although there’s plenty of conspiracy theories around that) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His term ended with a catastrophic election disaster against Reagan, with Carter winning just six states in 1980. But it’s his work as a man of peace after his presidency that really defined the President, working for world peace, the environment, and human rights right until his final years.
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A QUIET MONTH IN A FAILING BRITAIN…
Labour had a ‘relaunch’ just a few months after taking office… things are really not going well…
Kier Starmer’s new Labour government swept to power and then simply seemed to flounder. Nothing going right, continually relaunching policies, approval rating in the toilet. There’s trouble at the top and it’s affecting all of the country…
Steve Bright – one of many to do the ‘milestones’/’millstones’ gag…
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The Farage problem keeps getting bigger… and there’s a Musk involved…
Now a member of parliament (whose constituents haven’t seen him since his election), Nigel Farage, the architect of the disaster of Brexit and a man who courts controversy and anything that increases his media profile no matter what, is now courting a certain Elon Musk, who’s eager to stick the boot into the UK and thinking of putting money into Reform UK…
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CONFLICTS FOR CHRISTMAS – THE FALL OF ASSAD AND GAZA DEATHS CONTINUE…
The Fall of Assad
Syria’s President Assad was ousted. Putin welcomed another man with blood all over his hands to Moscow…
Morten Morland on the troubling future for Syria…
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And the War in Gaza continues…
Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the cartoonists this month. Sometimes death of innocents just doesn’t make the headlines when it’s been going on for so long….
