(Not The Bee) Does the Grand Old Party need a facelift?
I think Trump should formalize the reformation of the GOP by declaring it to be rebranded, with the lion as its logo. This way, the old GOP is swept into the dustbin of history where it belongs, symbolizing the realignment. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/BNOKBSxASi
— Vagrant of Rhodes 🗡️🕯️ (@vagrantwires) November 18, 2024
We associate an elephant with Republicans and a donkey with Democrats because of Thomas Nast, America’s first great political cartoonist, who depicted politics as a circus.
Nast was a Republican, but he portrayed the Republican Party as a well-meaning but bloated and cumbersome elephant. The Democratic Party was a braying donkey.
Consider this cartoon, where the elephant and the donkey are at the edge of a financial cliff. The elephant can’t be bothered to care about the danger (“Let Well Enough Alone”) and the donkey is actively trying to kill itself/the country by leaping away from the “safe and sound financial road” and into the abyss of “financial chaos.”
Not much has changed since 1879, eh??
The donkey as a symbol for the Democrats also connected to Aesop’s fable about the donkey who wears a lion’s skin.
(CS Lewis fans may recall this story being reused in “The Last Battle”)
In this cartoon, the Democratic media machine drives the public to panic about President Ulysses Grant being a dictator while the GOP elephant is warily teetering on the edge of another unstable cliff.
