Ottawa [Canada]: A Canadian cartoonist has lost his job after his controversial caricature of US President Donald Trump playing golf over the bodies of two drowned migrants from El Salvador went viral last week.
Michael de Adder’s illustration that went viral across the internet last Wednesday depicted Trump asking the two dead migrants, “Do you mind if I play through?”
The cartoon referred to the image of Oscar Alberto Martinez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, lying face down in murky water littered with reeds and discarded beer bottles.
The duo from El Salvador drowned last Sunday while attempting to cross the Rio Grande river near Brownsville to get into the United States.
On Friday, Adder took to social media saying that he had been let go by a publishing company in New Brunswick, Canada.
“The highs and lows of cartooning. Today I was just let go from all newspapers in New Brunswick,” De Adder tweeted.
His company, Brunswick News Inc. said in a statement on Sunday that “it is entirely incorrect to suggest” that it cancelled a freelance contract with de Adder over the Trump cartoon.
“This is a false narrative which has emerged carelessly and recklessly on social media,” the publishing company wrote.
It said that de Adder never offered the Trump cartoon to the company and had already decided to “bring back” another cartoonist it said was popular with readers. “[N]egotiations had been ongoing for weeks,” it stated.
De Adder tweeted that he would bounce back from losing the job and that he just had to “recoup a percentage of my weekly income.”
Meanwhile, Wes Tyrell, president of the Association of Canadian Cartoonists, a professional group for artists, claimed that the Brunswick newspapers avoided Trump as a subject of its cartoons — and de Adder “was doing them with regularity for the last couple of years, like any cartoonist.”
De Adder’s Trump depiction was the latest controversy surrounding political cartoons.
Earlier this month, The New York Times said it had decided to do away with editorial cartoons altogether following outrage over an errantly published an anti-Semitic cartoon in its international edition.
The US President is closely associated with the game of golf. By the time he was elected the President of America in 2016, Trump owned 17 golf courses worldwide.
[source_without_link]ANI[/source_without_link]