Trump campaign attempts to remove satirical cartoon from online retailer

The
Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Nick Anderson has described Donald Trump as an
“adolescent wannabe authoritarian”, after the US president’s re-election
campaign failed to pull one of Anderson’s cartoons mocking Trump’s inaccurate
suggestion that injecting disinfectant could protect against Covid-19.
Anderson put
his cartoon The Trump Cult up for sale on the online retailer Redbubble this
month. The illustration shows Trump with supporters in Maga hats, serving them
a drink that has been labeled “Kool-Aid”, then “Chloroquine” and finally
“Clorox”, a US bleach brand. The cartoon is a reference to the 1978 Jonestown
massacre, where more than 900 people died after drinking cyanide-laced punch at
the order of cult leader Jim Jones, and to Trump’s widely denounced idea of
injecting bleach to protect against coronavirus. Trump has also been taking the
anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a protection against Covid-19, despite
a study showing it has been linked to increased deaths in patients.
But Redbubble
pulled Anderson’s illustration from sale following a trademark infringement
claim made by Trump’s campaign organisation, Donald J Trump for President Inc.
Writing on the Daily Kos, Anderson said that he believed the claim was made due
to his depiction of Maga hats, and described the situation as “absurd”.
“We live in a strange time when the #POTUS can falsely
accuse someone of murder with impunity (violating @Twitter’s terms of service),
while at the same time bully a private business into removing content it
doesn’t like,” Anderson added on Twitter.
The Comic
Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) and other free speech organisations
subsequently got involved, sending a group letter to Redbubble that accused
Trump’s campaign of having “misused Redbubble’s reporting mechanism to suppress
protected political expression in the form of parody, critique, and satire”,
and arguing that the work and those who publish it are protected by the first
amendment.
Redbubble
reinstated Anderson’s cartoon this week, saying that it strives “to respect IP
rights and freedom of speech, but we sometimes make mistakes, as we did here …
We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.”
In a
statement, Anderson praised Redbubble for recognising the error, but said there
were some “troubling issues” raised by the affair, including that the cartoon
was removed less than 24 hours after he posted it, before he had received a
single order.
“I doubt
anyone had even seen it yet on the site,” he said. “This reveals that the Trump
campaign has a system in place, trawling for material they find objectionable.
If it happened to me so quickly, it likely has happened to others. How much
other content has been removed this way on Redbubble and other sites?”
He added: “It
must be pointed out: the president of the United States is a hypocrite who
complains about the ‘violation’ of his free speech on Twitter, then tries to
actively suppress the free speech of others. These are actions of an adolescent
wannabe-authoritarian.”
Trump
criticised Twitter this week for “completely stifling FREE SPEECH”, after the
social media platform put a warning label on two of his tweets spreading lies
about mail-in voting.
CBLDF
executive director Charles Brownstein said the organisation was “sensitive to
the issues companies like Redbubble face in balancing competing rights owner
issues, and were alarmed to see the president’s re-election campaign exploiting
those issues to suppress protected speech”.
“We’re
pleased that Redbubble has done the right thing in this case,” he said. “We
hope that they will continue to assert the First Amendment rights they and
their sellers are guaranteed by rejecting any similar censorship attempts.”