Halifax cartoonist rises to the challenges of current political moment

Award-winning editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder chats about drawing inspiration in today's political climate.

Michael de Adder is flourishing at work but that isn’t necessarily the best news for his fans. The award-winning political cartoonist said the current moment offers a “wealth” of things to cover.

“It’s just ridiculous,” de Adder said.

Amongst so much news de Adder said it can be hard to decide what to draw. He said his favourite subjects at the moment are U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk but Canada could offer new inspiration soon enough.

“We’re going into an election ourselves,” de Adder said. “Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre are pretty good subjects as well.”

De Adder said President Trump does cast a long shadow and often says or does things that undermine his work in progress.

“It’s like Trump has to outdo himself every day,” de Adder said.

There is more to de Adder’s work than choosing a subject. He said the process is different every day.

“There’s some days that it’s easy and I can’t explain why that is and there’s other days that it’s hard and I can’t explain.”

De Adder said sometimes it’s hard to find inspiration on busy news days and easy on quiet ones.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”

De Adder’s inspiration often amounts to a simple, visceral interpretation of complex events, like a recent cartoon that depicts Canadian shoppers looking for water on an empty U.S. beer shelf - his satirical response to the recent trade war between the two nations.

“The inspiration was the fact that, you know, American beer is rather watery,” de Adder said.

In another cartoon, de Adder showed Russian President Vladimir Putin pulling President Trump’s puppet strings during the now-infamous Oval Office meeting in which President Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance had a heated argument with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“That was one of the most horrendous moments in American history I can remember,” de Adder said.

Debates about free speech dominate the political moment but de Adder said nothing is off limits.

“I go after everything,” he said. “I don’t shy away from much.”

De Adder said the objective is to capture “water cooler moments.”

“Somedays you nail it and other days you don’t.”

There is no shortage of subjects for de Adder in the current climate but he said it presents other complications that make it hard to be heard, including stiff competition for audience attention.

“Trump is funnier than anything I can come up with.”

De Adder said he’s accustomed to his work being polarizing and his cartoons have offended people across the political spectrum.

“That’s been the job since, well, to be honest, since early humans drew on caves,” de Adder said. “That’s kind of the first political cartoons and we’ve been doing it ever since.”

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