The Trump Cartoon That Got the Canadian Cartoonist ‘Fired’

Here is the cartoon that got a Canadian cartoonist fired. It depicts Trump playing golf over the bodies of two drowned migrants – a horrible photographic image that went viral itself. Now the cartoon by Michael de Adder has gone viral itself.

The cartoon includes a hand-drawn image of Oscar Alberto Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, lying face down in the waters of Rio Grande River, having drowned while attempting to cross to get into the United States.

The cartoon went up and viral last Wednesday, June 26. Two days later, de Adder went on Twitter and told the world he had been let go.

You can read about the details and denials here at CNN – but here is a noteworthy quote:

Wes Tyrell, president of the Association of Canadian Cartoonists, a professional group for artists, claimed that the Brunswick newspapers avoided Trump as a subject of its cartoons — and de Adder “was doing them with regularity for the last couple of years, like any cartoonist.”

Tyrell and de Adder point to family connections between the ownership of the newspaper company and Irving Oil, a major Canadian energy company with interests in the United States as well. Arthur Irving, the owner of Irving Oil, has a net worth of $6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The Irving family is one of the richest in Canada.

“For a brief period, de Adder was the poster boy for the anti-Trump movement — a good place to be if you’re a cartoonist, but a bad place to be if you work for a foreign oil company with business ties to the United States,” Tyrell wrote in a statement on Facebook.  But Brunswick News Inc. has denied any connection with Irving Oil. It told CNN Business that “Brunswick News Inc. is not connected to Irving Oil. Irving Oil is a separate business, run by another family.”