WALNUTS
Walnuts is a Peanuts parody of the Trump presidency.
During the presidential term of Donald J. Trump the thought occurred to me that he and Lucy from the comic strip Peanuts were exactly the same creature. The journalist Christopher Caldwell described Lucy thus: "She's an American nightmare, a combination of zero brains, infinite appetites and infinite self-esteem, who is (for that reason) able to run roughshod over all her playmates." I suddenly realised that a parodic version of Peanuts could be the perfect cartoon vehicle to explore this Trumpian world. Children responsible for issues of consequence for all humanity was too funny and, scarily, too close to home to pass up. And, of course, Trump himself is an endlessly flowing pipeline of raw comic material.
I’d like to say that Walnuts was taken up by the one newspaper in the world I most wanted it to appear. It nearly was. Nearly doesn’t pay the bills though so after a while I moved on to other things.
Trump met the North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un in person 3 times. Famously, Kim Jong Un's father Kim Jong Il played just one game of golf in his life in which he set a world record of 34 under par, including 11 holes-in-one. True story.
Trump announced through a series of tweets that transgender individuals would no longer be allowed to serve in the US military.
Plompey, a.k.a. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, claimed to have "enormous evidence" that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab. The alleged evidence was never provided. The ancient Roman general Pompey was an ally, then enemy, of Julius Caesar. He was ultimately defeated by him in what is known as Caesar's Civil War.
William Barr, the US Attorney General, was a Trump loyalist who nevertheless came out publicly to say that the President's attacks on the Justice Department made it "impossible for me to do my job".
Rupert Murdoch was the head of Fox News and at the time was married to Jerry Hall. Known for their many distortions of the truth, Fox News had to pay out over three quarters of a billion dollars (that's a b) for repeatedly saying on-air that the 2020 election was rigged, despite knowing they were broadcasting lies. In a press conference Donald Trump recommended the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, as a treatment for covid. Also disenfectants and light. Everyone else was thinking nuts but they don't work either.
