MEXICO CITY // Donald Trump likes to think of himself as an inspiration. And he has certainly inspired cartoonists — so much so that Mexico City’s Caricature Museum has dedicated an entire gallery to the Republican presidential candidate.
Trump: A Wall of Cartoons is a reference Mr Trump’s threat to make Mexico pay for a giant barrier across its border with the US. He has described Mexican migrants as criminals and rapists and vowed to deport millions back to their homeland.
His words — and his distinctive hairstyle — have all served to spark the imagination of artists from around the world.
A cartoon by the Mexican artist Antonio Rodriguez Garcia shows the Republican Party’s symbol — a red and blue elephant — defecating dung shaped like Trump’s unmistakable hairdo.
Another signed Rodriguez image shows Mr Trump as Uncle Sam in the famous military recruitment poster. Only instead of “I want you”, the words read: “I hate you.”
In a similar far-right vein, the Spanish cartoonist Jose Rubio Malagon drew Mr Trump’s hair into the shape of a hand doing a fascist salute. Belgium’s Luc Descheemaeker, or O-Sekoer, drew Hitler’s own distinctive haircut and small moustache, which, if you look closer, is Mr Trump’s silhouette.
Others were less subtle, depicting Trump as a gorilla wearing a swastika armband or as a Hitler figure with blond hair. In another, Mr Trump, as the largest in a set of Russian nesting dolls, fits over Hitler, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
The man behind the exhibition is cartoonist Arturo Kemchs. As president of the Ibero-American Union of Graphic Humorists he requested contributions from his peers for a book on Mr Trump a few months ago. After his book, containing 350 cartoons, sold 2,000 copies, he had the idea of exhibiting the drawings.
“This is a character who made our work easier,” said Mr Kemchs, 57. “He’s an involuntarily comical character. He has taken over spaces in the sense that some cartoonists no longer do caricatures of Mexican politicians. They go with the Donald Trump theme because he gives us a lot of material.”
One of Mr Kemchs’s cartoons shows Mr Trump with a brick wall for hair, another with his quiff shaped like a tongue -“because of his ability to talk and talk nonsense.”
The exhibition will go on tour in two other Mexican cities, Chicago, New York, Panama and Colombia. Meanwhile in Mexico City, locals and tourists alike are enjoying the images.
Luis Antonio Engfui Amaya, a Mexican cashier at a sushi restaurant, liked a cartoon of a Mexican imagining himself whipping Trump as the real estate tycoon applies cement to a brick wall.
“It’s as if the Mexican citizen is telling him, ‘you want your wall, you build it.”
* Agence France Presse