At the end of last month, SCAD alums Ian Mather and Lindsey Cirmotich released their book “Mean Mr. Trump,” a comedic art-book that parodies President Trump in the style of “Eloise” by Kay Thompson. The book was written by Matter and illustrated by Cirmotich.
The idea first came to Mather a few days after President Trump was elected in 2016. “It was around the time that he was holed up in Trump Tower taking meetings with possible cabinet officials,” Mather said. “It reminded me of the old “Eloise” book and how she was sort of holed up in this fancy hotel and never seemed to leave…creating a character of Trump where he’s this mischievous child running around the White House seemed to make sense.”
When Mather approached Cirmotich with his idea for the project, she was initially hesitant. “I did not want to spread more hate out there, and frankly, I did not want my work to be associated with anything like the aggressiveness that was being shared at that time,” Cirmotich said. “But it was hard not to be inspired after Ian gave me his speech about ‘healing the world through laughter.’ We created ‘Mean Mr. Trump,’ and life did get a little easier day by day.”
Cirmotich worked on character designs and thumbnails, and the two worked together on background illustration jokes. “Lindsey is highly skilled at seeing the joke on text and making it ten times funnier through the illustration,” Mather said. “Trump is not the star of this book. Lindsey is.”
“It was great to work with someone who fully wanted the project to be collaborative to the end,” Cirmotich said. “It was a lot of sharing edits and suggestions to each other which truly helped the writing and illustrations flow together better…and many shared beers over how to make the book in a way that Trump may angry tweet about it.”
“I will say that SCAD prepared me fully for this kind of collaboration,” Mather said. “We’re both good at taking direction and notes and neither of us are too particularly precious about our ideas.”
The two began working on “Mean Mr. Trump” before a lot of the other recent political parodies emerged. “We were afraid someone would come out with a similar idea before our book came out,” Cirmotich said. “[There were] lots of mini heart attacks throughout the process.”
After getting the book signed by an agent, the two submitted it to several publishers. They received a lot of positive feedback, but no one was ready to publish it yet. “After the midterm buzz started to build, we made the decision to self-publish it anyway,” Mather said. “We found that there were so many things that had changed that we had to rewrite entire passages and redo a bunch of illustrations to make it fit our current times.” One of these changes included shifting the Press Room from Sean Spicer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a few hours.
A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to the ACLU. “They are still one of the few non-profits that are still fighting the legal battles required to reunite families separated by Trump’s zero tolerance policy,” Mather said. “It’s the least we can do to support that kind of bravery and selflessness,” said Cirmotich.
The book is available now on Amazon and at many booksellers. Mather and Cirmotich encourage customers to support their local book stores.
Elena Burnett is the Editor-in-Chief of District. She’s a writing major who will graduate in 2019.
