The Guy Who Tags the President in Every Drawing

By early 2017, Trump had been president for about two weeks and people were still arguing you should wait and see. Give him a chance. Don’t jump to conclusions. This was a position that required ignoring everything the man had said for the previous eighteen months and treating the presidency as a blank slate—a kind of willful stupidity, but people clung to it because the alternative was too depressing to sit with.

Rob Israel did not wait and see. The American illustrator started posting drawings to his Instagram shortly after the inauguration, and they were not subtle. Grotesque caricatures, sexual imagery, the kind of pictures that make you wince a little before you start laughing. He tagged the president in every single one. Whether Trump ever saw them is unclear, but the gesture had a certain integrity to it—you’re not just complaining into the void, you’re addressing the subject directly, knowing full well he won’t respond.

It seems like every week it just gets worse, Israel said. Trump’s probably on the phone with his boss Putin every day, scheming about how to further destroy the country. War can’t be far off. That last part turned out to be either prescient or hyperbolic depending on how you’re keeping score. But the rage underneath the cartoon ugliness made sense at the time.

What interests me about work like Israel’s isn’t the Trump content specifically—there was an entire cottage industry of anti-Trump art in those years, most of it predictable—but the directness. The tagging. The refusal to let the target pretend not to notice. It’s the difference between writing about someone and writing at them, and that distinction matters more than people give it credit for.