Debunking The Apprentice: Perceiving Trump as a Soiled, Murderous Toddler

Yvonne Owens, PhD
2 min readNov 27, 2020

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Political cartoon by Norwegian artist Bloom, 2016, published in Norwegian news outlet VG.

Apparently the tag #DiaperDon is currently trending on Twitter, which has spurred Trump to declare Twitter a “national security threat.” In a radical departure with regard to the Idiot’s incomprehensible spluttering and incoherent bloviating, I would agree, though my concerns as per Twitter and security threats have to do with the platform’s uncritical publication of all of Trump’s dangerously false Tweets over the greater part of the past 4 years, prior to them belatedly starting to label his Tweets from the presidential podium as perilously lying and threateningly mendacious.

In December 2016, Norwegian news outlet VG published a cartoon by the artist, Bloom, depicting President-elect Donald Trump as a baby in a diaper pulling on an American flag tablecloth. This political cartoon was the cover of a European magazine early on in Trump’s presidency, when #DiaperDon was perceived internationally as a real and present danger. It was thought too strong in its condemnation by some. Those critics had no idea how bad it could get.

Tags like #DiaperDon and images like this one need to by shared far and wide. It should be a billboard. He and his image need to be neutralized and debunked. The Apprentice persona still lives in the minds of far too many. His financial weakness needs to be exposed irrefutably, the depth of his debt to hostile foreign powers, the breadth of his failures and mental incompetence need to be exposed, beyond doubt. He needs to be put in jail.

Anti-Trump political cartoon by Michael de Adder

The cartoon image of him golfing past the dead toddler on the river bank, killed during a desperate attempt to cross into the U.S. by her asylum-seeking father, was actually banned it was so… accurate. and the artist lost his job over it.

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Yvonne Owens, PhD

I'm a writer/researcher/arts educator on Vancouver Island and all round global citizen who loves humans even though we're such a phenomenal pain-in-the-ass.