Auchtoon!

Elon Musk is back to throwing his considerable money at political campaigns. And why not? Terrible U.S. Supreme Court decisions have made it fine and dandy. And when your net worth is $1 trillion, $1 million is equivalent to what a dime is to somebody with a net worth of $100,000. Literally a rounding error.

Musk is donating to Republican candidates all over the country, including Michigan and especially to bolster Mike Rogers here. Does this have anything to do with the people of Michigan? Heck, no. Musk doesn’t have any significant business interests here. His companies don’t build cars, design rockets, or factory-produce propaganda in Michigan. But Republicans keeping control of the Senate would mean protection for his benefactor, Donald Trump, which would keep that sweet, sweet government money flowing in.

For you Looney Tunes fans, there’s a bit of an Easter egg in the cartoon. Musk’s behavior reminds me so much of Marvin the Martian. (Remember the character that wants to blow up Earth because it obstructs his view of Venus?) I couldn’t help but to have Musk quoting one of Marvin’s more famous lines.

The deadline for this cartoon was ahead of the debate between Michigan senatorial candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers, so there’s a decent chance that I’ve missed out on “the thing” that everybody is talking about. But there is also a strong possibility that the thing involves people associated with the candidates.

For El-Sayed, a past connection with streamer Hasan Piker has been problematic, particularly Piker’s anti-Israel rhetoric. And for good reason. Piker’s views are extreme and not in line with Michiganders. Voters have a right to be uneasy, even alarmed by this past connection.

El-Sayed has distanced himself from Piker. And he has clarified his own positions on antisemitism, condemning any rhetoric that puts the Jewish community at risk. For some voters, that’s enough. For others, it’s not.

For Mike Rogers, it’s a bit different. Actually, it’s a lot different. Instead of a relative nobody currently living out his only 15 minutes of fame, Rogers’ bête noire is (checks notes) the President of the United States!

Trump has made a political living for years saying and doing whatever the hell he wants. Somehow this is accepted as his style. But the horrible things he says and terrible decisions he makes aren’t working well for his Republican underlings. Many, like Rogers, are finally realizing this and are now scrambling to distance themselves from the president. For maybe a few voters, that will work. For most, it will not.

So I get it. If you’re a candidate who has sworn off corporate and billionaire Citizens United money, you have limited options to raise campaign funds, and pumping out texts and emails is one of those options. I don’t mind so much with the emails (I’ve had a forever yahoo account that is typically filled with junk anyway). But recently both political parties seemed to have found my phone number, and the texts are just pouring in.

Not all “attack” ads are necessarily bad. I mean, those darkened Willie Horten-era looking ads with the scary doctored photos and tragic audio tracks — I could do without those.

But this week, the El-Sayed campaign came out with a pretty dang clever ad taking Mike Rogers to task. It features Michigander Tim Robinson, and a hilarious skit from his show, “I Think You Should Leave.” In the skit, a car shaped like a hot dog (think Oscar Meyer wienermobile) crashes into a store. People in the store are in shock, and Robinson, dressed in a hot dog costume, begins to ask, “who could have done this?” It’s obvious to everybody that it’s the guy in the hot dog costume, but Robinson denies it and denies it.

Interspersed with that are clips of Mike Rogers claiming to be wanting to bring down drug and grocery prices, being against war with Iran, and making AI safety his top priority, when there is clear evidence that he has historically been working against all of these.

As a hat tip to Robinson and Sam Richardson and their “Detroiters” show, I took the opportunity to include a character wearing a “De2troit” t-shirt.

I sat down to create a cartoon on the U.S. automotive industry. It is apparent to most Michiganders that underpriced, government-subsidized, high-quality Chinese EVs are an existential threat to our state’s economy. They are the dominant player. According to Rush Doshi, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, China has roughly twice the manufacturing capacity of the United States. It’s bigger than the next nine countries combined.

The best strategy would be to build a coalition of allies as trading partners, creating a bulwark against a powerful, overbuilt Chinese automotive industry desperate for new markets. Instead, we have an administration driven by ego and petty grievances that is doing the exact opposite with tariffs and trade wars. The likely result: As our (former) allies are enticed to open their markets, we will eventually be overwhelmed.

That’s a lot to fit into a cartoon. And as regular readers are fully aware, I’m not afraid to load you up on multiple panels thick with contextual setup. But this week, I just couldn’t seem to simplify to the point of it not seeming like a homework assignment. So I distilled my point to its essence.

I don’t think President Trump is stupid. He obviously has skills to manipulate and instinct to cultivate his cult of personality. But I do think he’s willfully ignorant, and that’s different from stupid. He has the capacity to make better decisions, but he chooses the short-term, self-interest option every time.

Editor’s note: John Auchter is a freelance political 

Abdul El-Sayed faces some pretty obvious challenges in his run for Senate. He’s a progressive Democrat keen to avoid the dreaded “socialist” label. He’s a brown-skin man trying his best not to be scary to voters conditioned to be scared. And he’s a Muslim, which presents all sorts of traps and landmines.

But Mike Rogers has his own tightrope to walk. Because of his traditional Republican pedigree, it has to be so counterintuitive for him line up with the MAGA folks.

I’m sure Rogers would be happy to describe the GOP as “the party of fiscal responsibility,” but the Trump administration has been gleefully blowing holes in the federal deficit, spending billions on war and vanity projects and pitching potential giveaways in the trillions.

I’m sure Rogers would be happy to describe the GOP as “the party of free-market economics,” but the Trump administration has over and over unapologetically smashed the invisible hand with arbitrary tariffs (taxes) and so-called deals.

I’m sure Rogers would be happy to describe the GOP as “the party that abhors the government picking winners and losers,” but the Trump administration has taken unprecedented opportunity for his government (and his own interests) to grab ownership stakes of private enterprises.

Still, it could be even more challenging for them — they could be women.

The Broadway play Come from Away takes place in Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada starting on September 11, 2001. It is based on real-life events when 38 planes, carrying close to 7,000 passengers, were ordered to land unexpectedly at Gander International Airport. The characters in the musical are based on actual Gander residents and the stranded travelers they housed and fed in their small town.

The show is brilliant, funny, and moving. But one thing that it does particularly well is capture the enormous outpouring of goodwill the United States and the people of the United States received in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Our friends and allies rallied to our aid to support and, in some cases, sustain us.

And what have we done with that goodwill? Well, honestly, we certainly didn’t build on it. In fact, in the past 21 months, the current administration has actively set about destroying it. Don’t believe me? Ask our (possibly now former) friends and allies.

And here we are 25 years later — a cranky old barfly full of regrets but tragically incapable of recognizing how those regrets came to be. What was marketed as America First is in reality America Only.

Can we finally just admit that this cruel patchwork disaster that we call the American healthcare system is a failure? Not for everybody, of course. It works fine for the very, very rich. And for some of the perfectly healthy. But otherwise, for Americans as a whole, it’s terrible.

I submit for your consideration these latest examples:

Certain Michigan school districts are now offering insurance-free healthcare so employees can afford healthcare. So, bypassing health insurance because it’s both too expensive to buy and too expensive to use. This way, employees will hopefully be inclined to take better regular care of themselves. But if they make the mistake of getting hit by a car or developing the wrong cancer, too bad for them. They would need insurance to cover those costs. (Well, who really knows what it would actually cover?)

Some medical professionals are taking extraordinary steps to offer vaccine guidance directly to the American public because our federal government (specifically, the current administration) can no longer can be trusted to do so. Vaccine policy should never be subjected to the whims of a couple of nepo babies whose qualifications begin and end with what the latest social media influencer has whispered into their ears.

Sure, implementing Medicare-for-all will be disruptive. But it’s a real solution to a very real problem that’s getting worse and worse.

A trade war with …Canada? How? Why? And what the actual eff?

The answer, of course is quite simple: Donald Trump. He thinks the US/Canada trade relationship (like all relationships) is exactly like a 1970s New York City real estate deal and must be treated as such — lie, bluster, threaten, flatter, cajole, schmooze, lie, backstab, crime, belittle, complain, lie, stiff anybody who does actual work, and lie. And then ultimately create a “deal” that you have every intention of breaking at first convenience.

Now to understand why Trump sees the whole world this way, that answer is also quite simple: Roy Cohn. Cohn was Trump’s mentor/lawyer/fixer in his formative years of pulling himself up by the bootstraps of daddy’s fortune. Cohn is the thread that connects McCarthyism to Trumpism. May I suggest:

• Where’s My Roy Cohn? (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucOtZEu-SKw
• The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything (article): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/10/roy-cohn-profile (paywall)
• American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (book): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/American-Scoundrel/Kai-Bird/9781668031575

So before anybody comes at me about Canada possibly being the bad guy, tell me whether you know who Roy Cohn is and if you’re fine with the way he did business. If yes and yes, don’t expect a reply.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever understand how some people who purport to be Christian so thoroughly miss the actual teachings of Jesus Christ.

In my freshman Chemistry class at Michigan Tech, the introduction exercise was to have all us engineers-to-be look to our left, then look to our right and be told that one of us was likely no longer going to be there come the end of the term. Chemistry was famously a “weed-out” class.

In a way, it was somewhat humane. Many kids showed up at Tech lured by the starting salary that you could get with a degree, so it was better to figure out sooner rather than later whether you wanted to invest the 4+ years. (And actually, there were far more weeded out by the UP isolation and cruel winters than academic rigor — my freshman year we had well over 300 inches of snow.)

I was able to survive all that and graduate. Hurray for me! And also, who cares? It certainly doesn’t mean that a student today needs to have that exact same experience I did in order to succeed. We’ve learned a lot about mental health since then. (Educated people learn things. That’s how education works.)

The University of Michigan will start a pilot program in 2027 where many first-semester students will no longer receive letter grades on their transcripts — final letter grades will be replaced with a designation of either “pass” or “no credit.” The idea is to lessen the stress of starting college.

That was not my experience, but I am neither angry nor jealous. Quite the contrary — considering the current cost of a four-year degree, I’m happy for any help that students get.