The Trump administration insists its temporary beef import plan is simple economics. With America’s cattle herd at a 75-year low and ground beef prices frustrating consumers ahead of the midterms, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would temporarily allow up to 300,000 metric tons of imported lean beef to enter the country tariff-free. The administration says foreign suppliers have agreed to sell the meat at a 25 percent discount, lowering grocery bills while domestic ranchers rebuild their herds.

Then came the obvious question. Where is all of that bargain-priced beef actually coming from? Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say. Asked which countries beyond Mexico would supply the imports, she replied that those negotiations were still being handled by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and President Trump. For an administration asking Americans to trust an unprecedented influx of imported meat, the lack of specifics created an unusually conspicuous blank space.

The internet, as it invariably does, rushed to fill it. Within days, social media was awash in speculation linking Trump’s beef imports to a separate New York Times investigation into the Bureau of Land Management’s sale of federally protected wild mustangs for as little as $25 apiece. The Times reported that some of those horses entered the slaughter pipeline and were shipped to Canadian processing facilities. It did not report that the horses were entering the American beef supply. Nevertheless, the coincidence proved irresistible. AI-generated images showed grocery packages labeled “Mr. Ed Imported Beef.” Amateur sleuths posted guides explaining how to distinguish horse meat from beef by color, smell and fat content. The joke spread because it occupied that peculiar space between absurdity and plausibility.

There is no evidence Americans are about to unknowingly eat wild mustangs. But the fact that so many people found the rumor believable says something about the moment we’re living in.

Americans increasingly navigate the grocery store like investigators rather than shoppers. “The contemporary grocery aisle is full of labels, QR codes, lot numbers and assurances of transparency,” said Salon’s food writer Ashlie Stevens, “nevertheless, the person pushing the cart is increasingly asked to perform the work of tracing the food backward herself.”

That has become the defining problem of modern food shopping. Americans are no longer starved for information. They are drowning in it: recalls, ingredient lists, ownership records, traceback investigations, viral TikToks, congressional hearings and conflicting expert advice. The challenge isn’t access to information. It’s deciding which information deserves trust.

Ironically, the Trump administration has actively encouraged this skepticism. Much of the MAHA movement is built around asking consumers to question ingredients, challenge food manufacturers and distrust the institutions that have long defined what is safe to eat. Some of those questions are entirely reasonable. Greater transparency about food production, ultra-processed foods and regulatory oversight has broad bipartisan appeal.

But suspicion is difficult to contain. Teach millions of people that responsible citizenship requires looking behind the label, and eventually they’ll begin looking behind yours. That’s exactly what happened here.

The administration announced an unusually large volume of unusually inexpensive imported beef without initially identifying its suppliers. At nearly the same moment, another branch of the federal government was allowing federally protected horses to enter commercial sale under circumstances that ultimately led some into foreign slaughterhouses. The internet did what the internet has always done: it connected two unrelated facts with a story.

It was the wrong story, yet it was also an understandable one. History provides a reason for that instinct. In 2013, European regulators discovered that products marketed as beef across multiple countries actually contained substantial amounts of horse meat. Investigators eventually uncovered a labyrinthine supply chain involving brokers, processors and subcontractors spanning numerous countries. Consumers had trusted labels that turned out not to tell the whole story.

That scandal didn’t prove that suspiciously cheap beef is secretly horse meat. It proved something more enduring: most consumers know surprisingly little about the journey between an animal and the package sitting in the refrigerated case.

Perhaps the administration will soon identify every supplier participating in the import program. Perhaps the horse jokes will fade as quickly as they appeared. Or perhaps this episode will simply become another reminder that transparency isn’t merely good government. It’s also good rumor control.

Nature abhors a vacuum. The internet relishes a vacuum.

Thanks to everyone who voted in Saturday’s reader poll of unpublished cartoons. By popular demand, I decided to finish this one. I always think a cartoon needs to strike a chord with readers to be worth the effort, and your response convinced me this one was worth putting ink to paper (metaphorically speaking).

Trump’s petty insults and juvenile renaming stunts do nothing but diminish both himself and the office he holds. With nearly every outburst, he lowers the tone of our political culture and cheapens America’s image abroad.

A new Texas Public Opinion Research poll shows Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton in the race for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. John Cornyn. Among likely voters, 47% support Talarico, 40% support Paxton, 11% are undecided, 1% back a Libertarian candidate, and 1% say they would not vote.

Other polls are encouraging enough that Nate Silver’s election forecast rates the 2026 Texas Senate race between the two as leaning Democratic. In his Substack newsletter, the Silver Bulletin, he gives Talarico a 60.7 percent chance to win.

Texas has a long history of dashing Democratic hopes of a statewide win, but I do think the planets are aligning for an upset this year. Talarico is an excellent candidate, and Paxton is deeply flawed, to put it mildly.

Read more

Some of these were passed over by freelance clients in favor of other concepts. Others, I just didn’t get around to drawing. I tend to have more ideas than time to draw them (It’s a target-rich environment). I haven’t drawn these yet, but that doesn’t mean they are completely dead. I might come back later and revisit them, so feel free to let me know which ones you think are worth drawing.

This first one is about Dolly Parton. My editor at The Contrarian reached out right after the news broke and asked if I could come up with something. I declined because I was already in the middle of a cartoon, but mostly because I didn’t feel like I could do her justice. I don’t like country music, and while I always found her charming when I saw her interviewed, I honestly just didn’t know what an amazing person she was. After watching so much coverage about her, I now know that I missed out. She was pretty special. It’s also ironic how many right-wingers love her, even though we know they loath her philosophy of acceptance.

But obit cartoons have a short shelf life, and when I approached the subject the next day, I started brainstorming ideas that were one-step removed from an actual obituary cartoon.

Read more

It’s hard for me to work up much sympathy for cattle ranchers who voted for Trump—and most of them did—but Trump’s latest move to allow more imports doesn’t make a lot of sense. Trump’s proclamation removes tariffs from 300,000 metric tons of imported beef for 90 days, and he claims the countries supplying the beef would sell it at 25 percent below current market prices.

It is veeeeery frustrating to watch people applaud cruelty as long as it's directed at someone else, only to discover—much to their shock—that cruelty has a way spreading beyond it’s intended targets. That says far more about character than it does about politics and it reveals an uncomfortable truth: for too many people, injustice isn't a problem until they're the ones experiencing it.

But this eleventh-hour change in tariff policy reeks of desperation. It’s likely too late to change the American voter’s perceptions of the affordability crisis, since perceptions of the economy and the attendant affordability issues tend to harden by June.

Political analysts (according to Google) widely subscribe to the “June Lock-In” theory, which posits that voters’ perceptions of the economy solidify by June of an election year. [1, 2]

This psychological and political phenomenon means that economic shifts occurring in the final months of a campaign rarely alter the electoral outcome.

So, even if beef prices decline by November, it’s too late to do much, if any, good for the GOP. Meanwhile, the policy change is enraging cattle ranchers, and It’s worth noting that the 90-day policy change conveniently expires after the midterms. The result is an incoherent policy that it manages to anger just about everyone.

Trump claims that foreign nations have agreed to sell beef to the United States at 25 percent below current market prices. Which nations? Nobody knows. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, when asked, admitted she was not “privy” to that information.

The Secretary of Agriculture claims she is not privy to where the beef is coming from. If the Cabinet secretary responsible for American agriculture is in the dark, one wonders whether this “negotiation” occurred anywhere outside the president’s imagination.

American ranchers are now wondering why they voted for the guy. The American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the Livestock Marketing Association, and the United States Cattlemen’s Association—all groups that would typically cheer for a Republican president—have written to Trump begging him to reverse course.

The economics are as brutal as they are obvious. American cattle inventory is at a 75-year low. Ranchers are already struggling with drought, high input costs, and years of thin margins. The logical response to low supply is to incentivize domestic production—to help ranchers rebuild their herds so that in two or three years, American consumers have abundant, homegrown beef. Instead, Trump is penalizing them. By dumping subsidized foreign trimmings onto the market, he is driving cattle prices lower at the exact moment ranchers are making herd-building decisions.

Trump’s proclamation includes an escape clause: if prices don’t come down or countries don’t sell at the promised discount, he “may end the action.”

This is ridiculous, but what do you expect from a guy who runs the country like a game show host. Ranchers can’t base business decisions on a 90-day import window that might close if the president wakes up grumpy. They make multi-year commitments. A cow gestates for nine months and takes two years to reach market weight.

This isn’t a sound policy. It’s a panic button pressed by a clown who has concluded that temporarily enraging ranchers is worth a few cents off ground beef before Election Day. It treats American agriculture as a disposable constituency and the nation’s food supply as a campaign tool.

I’m generally a supporter of free-trade, but food is different. We can’t live without it, and there’s a strong case to be made that food security is more important than maximum efficiency.

So, the “America First” president is now proposing to make American ranchers compete against tariff-free imports from unnamed countries, sold at fantasy prices, managed by officials who don’t know the details, on a timeline designed to last exactly until the midterms are over. If this is putting America first, then American cattlemen are entitled to ask: what exactly comes second?

It’s getting harder and harder to tell whether Trump’s economic sanctions, trade wars and actual shooting wars are hurting our enemies, allies or Americans the most. The fact that it’s even debatable speaks volumes.

On a related note, when I drew this cartoon (below) two months ago, I had a nagging thought in the back of my mind: I hope this remains satire and isn't actually turned into reality by the insatiable egomaniac in the White House.

We are ruled by a Mad King enabled by his servile minions who have no regard for the lasting damage they do to our republic. They’re trying to make it reality. It’s nearly impossible to satirize this administration. There is no bottom.

Trump administration says it might demolish the Kennedy Center if court blocks renovations

Read more

With the midterms just around the corner, Americans are packing town halls to stop AI data centers they fear will raise electric bills, consume scarce water, and transform their communities. President Trump, meanwhile, remains fixated on building a grand White House ballroom. It’s an oddly revealing split-screen: voters are fighting to preserve the places they live, while the president is focused on upgrading the place he lives.

Darline Graham—appointed to the United States Senate last month to fill the seat of her late brother, Lindsey, and now campaigning to keep it—has spent the past week demonstrating that the only qualification she possesses is a surname and a presidential endorsement. Everything else, it seems, is irrelevant.

Let’s begin with the debate. When asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea constitute national security issues for the United States, Graham responded with the kind of refreshing candor regarding her unpreparedness for the job that would get you fired from Wendy’s, let alone a Senate campaign. “National security is not my thing,” she explained, adding that she is “not a polished politician” and “not an expert on national security.”

This is the foreign policy equivalent of applying to be a surgeon and announcing that blood isn’t really your thing. One half-expects her to follow up by noting that legislation also isn’t her thing, and that the Senate chamber gives her mild vertigo.

But Graham was not done. In what can only be described as a bold reimagining of American demographics, she informed the debate audience that South Carolina contains “50 million people.”

The actual population is 5.6 million, which means Graham overshot by a factor of nearly nine. To put this in perspective, there are only about 335 million people in the entire United States. In Graham’s South Carolina, the state would comprise roughly fifteen percent of the national population, making it larger than Texas and Florida combined. This is not a gaffe; this is a hallucination. When your estimate of your own state’s population is off by 44 million souls, one wonders what other figures you might be fuzzy on: the national debt, perhaps, or the number of branches of government (it’s three, Darline).

Her opponent, Ralph Norman, has run as a “tested conservative,” which in this context means he has at least heard of Taiwan and owns a map.

Rep. Nancy Mace, no stranger to her own theatrical moments, compared Graham’s debate performance to “applying to be a lifeguard and saying water isn’t your thing.” It is a rare day when Nancy Mace is the voice of measured understatement.

But none of this matters, because Donald Trump has arrived to explain that actually, ignorance is honesty. Graham wasn’t unprepared, you see; she was “being honest.” She is “into the price of groceries, the price of beef,” and that, apparently, is sufficient qualification for a seat in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of Donald Trump praising the virtues of honesty, he is essentially reducing the United States Senate to a neighborhood Facebook group where expertise is suspect and knowing the cost of ground beef is a substitute for understanding the foundational tenets of our foreign policy. Graham herself has leaned into the anti-credentials pitch, declaring that her lack of political experience is an asset and comparing herself to Trump, who “had never served in an elected office before.” It’s the political equivalent of a flight school applicant invoking Amelia Earhart’s disappearance as proof that experience is overrated.

Graham has taken the courageous stance of “fully trusting” Trump on the Iran war, which is convenient because it absolves her of having to learn what the Iran war actually is.

So here is where we stand: a United States senator who does not know her state’s population, who does not consider national security her “thing,” and who believes that honesty is an acceptable substitute for competence, is quite possibly going to be elected by the people of South Carolina because her brother was delightfully obsequious and sufficiently servile to Dear Leader.

Drawn to Justice will air…

Read more

The visual of Abbott awkwardly going to town on a rack of meat spawned a lot of memes in its wake. Here’s a clip, followed by my take on it for freelance client Lone Star Project. I had fun drawing him looking like a crazed lunatic with a blade.

Read more

Donald Trump announced he’s looking forward to another summit with Kim Jong Un. Kim responded the traditional North Korean way: by launching a volley of ballistic missiles into the sea. Trump has repeatedly praised his “great relationship” with Kim, apparently operating under the theory that if two people get along personally, one of them will eventually stop building nuclear weapons.

Or, maybe, one of them is being played.

It’s all very reminiscent of when Trump declared at a rally in 2018 that "we fell in love.”

“I was really being tough - and so was he. And we would go back and forth,” Trump said. “And then we fell in love, okay? No, really - he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” he said.

At this point, the Trump-Kim relationship resembles that one friend who keeps insisting, “He’s really a great guy once you get to know him,” while everyone else counts the explosions in the background.

The United States is this week expected to cross a financial milestone that once seemed almost unimaginable: $40 trillion in national debt. The federal debt has doubled since first took office in 2017, and he’s added more to it than Biden. Critics may complain that this cartoon is unfair because both parties added to the debt. But Trump has certainly had more to do with creating the debt than he did the Kennedy Center.

The $40 trillion number itself is largely symbolic—there is nothing magical about crossing another trillion-dollar threshold—but the speed at which the government is reaching it tells a more troubling story.

Just six months ago, the Congressional Budget Office projected that debt would top out at about $39.4 trillion this fiscal year. Instead, Treasury officials now expect the nation to surpass $40 trillion almost immediately, driven in part by the loss of roughly $250 billion in anticipated tariff revenue after the Supreme Court invalidated President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. To cover the shortfall, Treasury has accelerated borrowing, pushing the debt higher months ahead of schedule.

The timing could hardly be worse.

For years, investors treated U.S. Treasury bonds as the world’s safest asset, allowing Washington to borrow at relatively modest cost even as deficits ballooned. That assumption is beginning to look less certain. Concerns over inflation, global conflict, and growing sovereign debt around the world have pushed long-term Treasury yields to their highest levels in nearly two decades, meaning the government must pay substantially more to finance both existing debt and new borrowing.

The consequences are already becoming visible. Annual interest payments are projected to exceed $1 trillion this year—roughly equal to the Pentagon’s budget. Unlike spending on defense, infrastructure or research, interest payments purchase no new capability. They simply compensate investors for money already borrowed. Every additional dollar devoted to interest is a dollar unavailable for future priorities.

Because borrowing is occurring faster than expected, the government could reach the current $41.1 trillion debt ceiling by early next year, months sooner than many analysts anticipated. That raises the prospect of yet another debt-limit confrontation in Congress, where lawmakers will once again argue over borrowing authority to finance spending that has largely already been approved.

Ironically, the debt ceiling debate often obscures the larger issue. Raising the debt limit does not authorize new spending. It merely allows Treasury to pay bills Congress has already incurred. The real drivers of debt lie elsewhere: persistent budget deficits, repeated tax cuts without offsetting revenue, growing entitlement costs, rising military spending, and decades of bipartisan unwillingness to align government spending with government income.

Both political parties share responsibility for the trajectory. The debt has climbed steadily through Republican tax cuts under George W. Bush, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, emergency spending during the Great Recession, the 2017 Trump tax cuts, massive pandemic relief under both Trump and Biden, and more recent tax-and-spending packages. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act alone will add roughly $4.7 trillion to projected deficits over the next decade.

The current administration argues that stronger economic growth and efforts to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse will eventually improve the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio. Critics counter that economic growth alone is unlikely to offset deficits approaching $2 trillion annually, particularly as interest costs continue to compound.

Perhaps the greatest danger isn’t that the United States will suddenly default. Treasury has repeatedly navigated past debt-ceiling crises through accounting maneuvers and emergency cash management, and Congress has always ultimately acted to preserve the nation’s credit.

The greater risk is something slower and more subtle: an economy increasingly constrained by the cost of servicing yesterday’s borrowing. Every year that interest consumes a larger share of federal revenue, policymakers have less room to respond to recessions, wars, natural disasters or demographic challenges without borrowing even more.

Crossing $40 trillion isn’t the crisis. It’s a reminder that America’s fiscal challenge is no longer a distant warning. It has become an ever-larger feature of the federal budget itself. The milestone matters less because of the number than because it illustrates how quickly Washington’s margin for error continues to shrink.

When ICE announced plans to spend up to $20 million on electric shock gloves, the debate initially centered on the technology itself. The devices—called Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters, or G.L.O.V.E.—deliver painful electrical shocks through direct contact and are marketed as “conductive distraction and de-escalation” tools. The Trump administrati…

Read more

Bonus cartoon for today (OK, I actually drew it last night).

Read more

There is a special kind of madness that descends upon an administration when it begins to treat its enemies with more courtesy than its allies. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this kind of thing over and over again from Trump. Over the weekend, that madness arrived again in the form of a Truth Social post (shocker) from Trump, who casually announced that he h…

Read more

This cartoon for the Dallas Morning News is based on one of their editorials about putting billboards in parks to help fund them. The editorial board argues that Dallas is steadily commercializing public spaces in its search for revenue, and that the latest proposal—to install large digital billboards in city parks—crosses an unacceptable line. I agree.

Read more

Read more

I’ve been out of town for the past couple of days enjoying a little camping getaway. It was a nice break. But when I heard that the president hid in a food catering truck to avoid the risk of an Iranian attack on Air Force One, I found myself wishing I were back at my drawing table.

Now, I don’t necessarily object to using a ruse to protect the president…

Read more

The reflecting pool wasn’t the only flawed and botched installation of late. Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general is a disgrace. Blanche is brazenly loyal to President Trump rather than to the impartial administration of justice.

Blanche has repeatedly undermined the Justice Department’s credibility. More than 1,200 DOJ employees and 35 former…

Read more