At this point in the election cycle, I’d be troubled if I thought you weren’t familiar with the Republican nominee for president. But let’s say you needed to explain candidate Donald Trump to someone who’s been in a coma for the last 20 years — someone who isn’t aware of Trump’s brand of boisterous, adolescent non-politics, but is deeply familiar with the characters of 1990s newspaper comics. You wouldn’t need to spend much time going into detail about Trump’s various offensive statements or his inability to stay on message or his pathological need for attention. You could just say: Donald Trump is Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. And you could show them this Imgur gallery.
The modified cartoons come from an entire subreddit, /r/DonaldandHobbes, devoted to shopping the many faces of Donald Trump onto Calvin’s tiny, T-shirt-wearing body. “The strip you paste Trump’s head over has to contain dialogue that Trump might actually say. You can edit dialogue so Calvin’s name is missing or certain words (perhaps too intelligent for Donald) are gone. But just putting Trump’s head on Calvin acting like a kid is missing the point,” explains the subreddit’s rules, which seem entirely too fair and kind to Mr Trump.
Money, women, conspiring against your political enemies, Calvin (as Trump) has a hot take on all of it. And somehow, it’s a little bit more palatable coming from the body of a small, animated child. (Until you remind yourself that small child could potentially run the United States government.)
Should a Trump presidency actually come to fruition, we can only hope he’ll appoint a stuffed tiger as his chief of staff. Which, at this point, doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility. Besides, Calvin never really heeded Hobbes’s advice anyway. Which seems like a very Trump thing to do.
