Far-right cartoonist Ben Garrison frequently posts bigoted illustrations of conservatives' favorite enemies on his website, but the absurdity of his work is even more apparent in his portrayals of former President Donald Trump.
Garrison often paints Trump as an athletic, god-like figure leading the crusade against supposed enemies of freedom.
But a recent Garrison masterpiece is going viral for all the wrong reasons.
Trump recently announced a lawsuit against Big Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google's YouTube for what he says are free speech violations against conservatives. Trump and his ilk immediately started fundraising off the effort.
Garrison attempted to embody Trump as a fighter against Big Tech suppression, portraying Big Tech as a windmill and Trump as the literary icon Don Quixote.
There's just one problem.
Don Quixote is the main character of the 15th century story The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.
Quixote is an aging and angry man who becomes delusional and rebrands himself as a knight, donning a dilapidated suit of armor and mounting an exhausted horse. He sees inns as castles, innkeepers as lords, and windmills as ferocious giants.
Quixote's feud with windmills has been an enduring theme for centuries, and gave birth to the British phrase "tilting at windmills," meaning to fight enemies that don't actually exist.
Garrison's portrayal of Trump as Don Quixote pursuing the windmill of Big Tech censorship paints the former President as delusional, mounting a war on an imaginary foe—a primary criticism of Trump's
Garrison tried to clarify that Trump's enemies aren't imagined—the diametric opposite of the meaning conveyed by his picture—but the internet had to laugh at the accidentally true comparison.
Garrison's attempts to clarify were mocked as well.
Trump has been compared to Don Quixote before, however, due to both of their obsessions with windmills.
