Blog / 2026 / No Kingzzz

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

I’ve made a lot of portraits of Trump over the years.

First there was this flaming painting of the president that I made after the torch-wielding neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia. It became the cover of an Oxford University Press book a few years later.

Then there was this attempt at a comprehensive portrayal of all the bad he was bringing, but, since I painted it in 2017, it’s missing a whole lot. A couple years later, this piece ended up in Newsweek after it was censored from an art exhibit at a public library.

In 2018, I painted Trump and over a hundred of his most awful friends. Some of his cohort of criminals has changed between then and now, but I stand by this piece as an important reminder that Trump is unable to accomplish much without a whole team of enablers and pushers.

After that massive group portrait, I took a little bit of time off from painting the Liar-in-Chief, until last April for the Hands Off protest, for which I made this piece. Afterward, so many people were emailing asking for permission to print it out to protest at the No Kings events that happened later in the year that I made this coloring page protest poster so that people could print something out more easily—and also to give them a chance to get their art on by adding the color themselves.

For the most recent No Kings protest I planned to be in New York City, so I knew I needed a travel-size poster that I could bring with me, which is why I made this image. Or that explains the size, anyway.

As for the idea behind the image, I was trying to figure a way to capture the certainty most of us feel about it being time for the 25^th Amendment to be used to get this criminal out of office. He has never been fit for the presidency. His extraordinary greed, his inability to communicate without exaggeration or outright lies, his blatant racism, misogyny, and ableism—not to mention his complete misunderstanding of the role of a public servant and the fact that his name appears more than a million times in the Epstein files—all of that has always made him the worst person for this job.

But, more recently, he’s gone over a mental cliff, as he lashes out in small ways like with a “quiet, piggy” here and a cutting of drug prices by “1500 percent” there or in big ways like by kicking off another World War because he likes the sizzle reels of military force that his aides show him. I was trying to think of something that summed that all up, and I landed on how much he struggles to keep his eyes open at meetings and events.

Because, no matter what else he does, a president who falls asleep in public is not able to fulfill his duties. Period.

I loved marching in New York. There were so many brilliant signs and so much excellent artwork. I went by myself and I’ve never been good at selfie-ing, but I did manage to accidentally snap this photo of the reverse of my poster, which depicts a monarch butterfly as a reference to the artist Favianna Rodriguez Giannoni’s famous work Migration Is Beautiful, a lovely reminder of “the natural right of all beings to move freely, beyond man-made borders.”