The Trumpiad

Few politicians in history have deserved lampooning as richly as Donald Trump. And few have gotten their just deserts served up as deliciously as they are in The Trumpiad, a work perceptively characterized by Stuart Klawans as “a true epic about a mock President.” In their caustic, uproarious Trumpiad, poet Evan Eisenberg and artist Steve Brodner present a satire in verse for our demented times. Inspired by Swift, Byron, and Ogden Nash as much as by John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, Eisenberg sets the stage (“Muse, you’re fired”) and then traces our hero from the murk of his ancestry in the form of his grandfather Friedrich (an enterprising immigrant who ran a bordello) to the latest presidential high crimes and misadventures.

Using a rakish, endlessly flexible five-line stanza he calls the Emilick—the love child of Emily Dickinson and Edward Lear— Eisenberg follows the arc of Trump’s career as it bends toward injustice, hits it, and then sinks still lower. Brodner matches the poet punch for punch, in the spirit of such great satiric artists as Hogarth, Goya, and  Daumier.

About the illustrator:

A regular contributor to the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Harper’s, Esquire, Playboy, Mother Jones, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times, Steve Brodner has been hailed by Lewis Lapham as “a born arsonist” and by Edward Sorel as “incomparable…the best caricaturist around.” Widely credited with spearheading the revival of drawn satire over the past four decades, Brodner is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hamilton King Award and the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

This is the ballad of Donald Trump,

       A tale of greed and gall;

A tragedy birthed before our eyes—

A man, his money, his mouth, his rise

       And if there’s a God, his fall.

—The Trumpiad