The Penguin Returns

"Be Careful What You Ask For"

This latest installment in my Batman parody lands us at the midpoint of Cobblepot’s second term. The grift, remarkably, is still running — though the paint job is chipping and you can see the rust underneath.

Back in April 2019, when the Mueller Report finally dropped and PBS NewsHour/Frontline gave it the full hour-long treatment, this blog started calling Trump “President Cobblepot.” The resemblance to Batman’s nemesis, Penguin, was too good to pass up: a crook who gets himself popularly elected Mayor of Gotham, then uses City Hall as a chop shop for eliminating rivals and expanding the family business.

As it turned out, Cobblepot’s short game — propped up by an alliance of crime syndicates — proved every bit as durable as Mueller’s long game was slow. Two impeachments. Thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records. A $450 million fraud verdict against his real estate empire. The Georgia RICO conspiracy. Two multimillion-dollar rape and defamation judgments. Forty felony counts in Florida and four in D.C., courtesy of Jack Smith. He shrugged off the lot of it like a man swatting gnats, then went back to the White House anyway — this time with a vengeance and, apparently, a mandate—more, much more.

In a 2019 post, Professor Cobblepot’s Marvelous Purple Fog News Machine, I closed with a scene of Sunrise Movement kids paying an unannounced visit to Senator Dianne Feinstein. She tried to educate them in her reality — compromise, incrementalism, seniority, the long patient math of a Senate career.

“It’s not going to get turned around in 10 years,” she told them, with the weary confidence of someone who has outlasted every crisis so far.

They weren’t buying it. Their reality was dying polar bears, drowning coastlines, famine, war, a shortened life expectancy with their own names on it. “Senator, if this does not get turned around in 10 years, you’re looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with these consequences.”

When two narratives are each sealed tight against the other, there’s not much to do but live by your own best lights, keep learning, and help the kids get ready. Sooner or later the fog Feinstein was standing in gets burned off by plain physical reality — but if you can already see daylight, don’t wait around for consensus. Move to high ground. Build your fire perimeter. Grow food, store water. And vote out the fossils.

I came back to Cobblepot in January 2020 with Thugs and Circuses, and again in December 2022 with Professor Cobblepot’s Marvelous Final Engagement in the Freeverse Theater State. But by then AI tools had gone free and user-friendly enough that the medium itself started demanding an upgrade — from essay to graphic novel. On February 23, 2025, I test-drove the first two pages of Comic Shift, my debut issue of Actung! Comics.

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The comic told a darker Cobblepot backstory than my prose ever managed — the Russian mob in Queens, money laundering through his high-rises, the casinos, the boxing and wrestling franchises, the beauty pageants. Some readers assumed it was fiction; my own comic tone practically invited that assumption. It wasn’t. That backstory is now, in cautious baby steps, turning up in outlets like Axios, ProPublica, Meidas Touch, and The Bulwark. On March 2, 2025, I unveiled The Dark Night, with installments following on March 9, 23, and 30 and April 6, then the full 25-page graphic novel aggregated on April 8.

Sidney Blumenthal, on The Court of History podcast, put the throughline better than I could:

Go back to Roy Cohn, his lawyer and mentor, who was indicted multiple times for all sorts of crimes associated with boxing promotion, and whose father was a boxing promoter. When Donald Trump went to Atlantic City, he decided the only way he could make money was by dealing with boxing promoters … today that has morphed into MMA, and the big thing on the South Lawn, and his support for sports gambling, and his support for what’s going on with prediction markets. And it all goes back into the core of the corrupt heart of who Donald Trump is. … And here we are in 2026, with Don Jr. having a wedding, underwritten by a boxing promoter who’s pals with the Kremlin, and all of it says we’ve come no distance on the inner world of Donald Trump.

This is who he is. This is why he celebrated July 4th with an MMA event on the South Lawn of the White House. When the war started in Iran, where was he? He was with Marco Rubio at an MMA event in Miami. This is how his son, Baron, is so into the Tates, and that whole (man-o-sphere) world, which is tied into MMA, and boxing, and corruption, and Russia, and oligarchs. And it’s all tied together, and there’s one story, and it’s so useful, because it reminds us that the roots to this corruption run incredibly deep.

… You know, Don Jr. is a defense contractor for the United States. … Don Jr. is providing drone technology and other technologies to the Department of Defense, and he’s flying around with the president, going to diplomatic meetings, but he’s also in bed with this Russian oligarch, who is in bed with Vladimir Putin. That’s the kind of thing you would think would be looked into. Now, of course, in a normal government, somebody in the Defense Department would have raised a red flag. The Inspector General would have raised a red flag. The White House counsel would have raised a red flag. The Attorney General would have raised a red flag. And, of course, in this government, the job of all of those people is to enable Trump and to enable Trump’s family to be as corrupt as they want to be.

… Donald Trump’s level of growth and evolution as a person is zero. The Donald Trump you got in the ‘80s, and the ‘90s, and the oughts, and the teens, and the twenties, it’s the same guy. He’s interested in the same things. He behaves the same way with women. He violates standards of behavior in the same ways, just as vulgar. He’s just as caught up in the same kind of demon underworld as he has been the whole time. If you lived in New York City, as I did in the 1980s, and you saw Donald Trump, with Roy Cohn, and Don King, building these buildings, with the Russians coming in — who were, back then, not oligarchs, but just the Russian mob — and you asked, “Well, what kind of president would he be?” It would be exactly like this.

—Sidney Blumenthal, The Court of History, a Legal AF Podcast on MTN

Which is really the whole thesis in one paragraph: no growth, no evolution — same guy, bigger suit, better lawyers, worse impulse control.

I came back to the format on November 30 with a two-page Batman comic, The Return of Jack Smith, then followed it with seven four-page sequels in English and Spanish — December 7, 21, and 28, and January 4, 11, 18, and 25 of this year. A short two-pager in English and German covered the secret immigration torture camps on March 8; a three-pager on the Tech Bros ran in English and Arabic on March 15; and on March 22 came a four-page fairy tale, in English and Hebrew, on the President’s Mad King senility. Another mini-graphic novel, The Godfatter, ran March 29 and April 12. And last month, on August 16, A True Crime Family Coloring Book covered his latest round of grifts.

Now comes the newest installment: an eight-page sequel covering some new revelations in this ongoing tragicomedy playing out in Washington. History keeps writing new panels faster than I can ink them. I’m just trying to keep up.

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We support Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road, and we work to heal collective trauma worldwide through the Pocket Project. I will be attending Thomas Hübl’s Healers on Healing event September 17 and so can you! It’s free. There is more about our work on the Global Village Institute website (GVI.cool). I appreciate your support.

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#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. So the lesson is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

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This post is public, so feel free to share it.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

 

These bumper stickers should be on every porta-potty at Burning Man! We now have our own merchandise store on Redbubble. Swing on in for the latest wearables and chachkas….

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