By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

PARIS, France – If he’s done nothing else, Donald Trump has proved to be a boon to Parisian street artists.

Caricatures of the president of the United States festoon walls, sidewalks, street signs. Just about any flat surface here in the City of Lights seems to serve as an invitation to those with a gift for graffiti.

Part of the reason the street artists see Trump as such an alluring subject is that his features lend themselves so well to caricature.

The overheated souffle of a hairstyle.

The perpetual jutty pout of the lips and chin.

The furrowed brow and the eyes squeezed in a perpetual squint.

But a lot of it also is that the French have enough distance from Trump that they can see his presidency as a sort of performance art. Soaked in an operatic tradition that is seasoned with hyperbole, they see Trump’s tantrums and eruptions as funny rather than tragic, each meltdown just another instance of a determined diva claiming center stage once more.

The fact that he is not their president gives them space enough to laugh instead of cry.

When I landed in Paris, President Trump had tossed his own government into turmoil once again.

Angered that neither Republicans nor Democrats seem eager to pay for Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, Trump blew up a budget deal that would have kept the government running. He seemed to see this stance as a political winner for him as if denying government workers by the hundred thousand their jobs and paychecks and millions of others needed or helpful services during the holiday season were a gesture that would endear him to them.

Then, at almost the same time, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced he would be leaving, effective at the end of February. The defense secretary’s letter of resignation was a measured statement of classic conservative foreign policy principles, and thus, even more, damning an indictment of the president because of the restrained language.

Mattis’s implied message was that the supposed adults in the Trump White House no longer could control the infant king and wanted to depart the scene before the howling baby monarch wrecked not just the playroom, but the entire castle and kingdom.

At the bistro where I stopped to have lunch and nurse a glass of dry red wine, I mentioned to the folks at the table next to me all the Trump caricatures I’d spotted about town.

Several glasses ahead of me, they chuckled, then laughed.

That Trump, they chortled, as if he were the foil in a farce rather than the head of state for a superpower, a chieftain with nuclear launch codes at this disposal.

Their own president, Emmanuel Macron, they don’t chuckle about. The yellow-vest riots and other disturbances that have marred the French peace are a source of either anger or annoyance, depending upon one’s devotion to or disapproval of Macron.

Because he is the leader of their nation, him they take seriously. He is their president, their potentate, their problem.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is comic relief, someone else’s blessing or a curse.

Warmed by the wine and the savory croque madame in my stomach, I step out to walk off lunch.

Along the way, I encounter yet another caricature of Trump, this one a full-color offering on a wall.

It’s a beauty.

The hair rises like a yellow meringue.

The eyes, lips, and face are scrunched as if their possessor were trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a soccer ball.

A lot of effort – tremendous attention to detail – went into this bit of comic art, all to produce some chuckles for those who amble or motor by.

But that’s the way it so often is in life.

What’s funny to some isn’t to others.

And vice versa.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. 

The City-County Observer posted this article without bias, opinion or editing.