We are publishing a new poster—Trump (Moloch)—to protest the anti-scientific, anti-environmental policies of Donald Trump and the Republican party. We will be attending the San Francisco “March for Science” on April 22 with our posters held high.

The poster design is a variation of one I originally created for an international environmental poster exhibit in 1997. (See lower image.) The exhibit coincided with the Third Session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan. (This session produced the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that committed signatories to reduce greenhouse gasses in an effort to slow the effects of climate change. Although the United States signed the Protocol under President Clinton, the Senate failed to ratify the treaty.)

The 1997 version of my poster is titled Capitalism Consuming His Children (Moloch). The image is inspired by Francisco Goya’s 1819–23 painting Saturn Devouring His Children, and depicts a disembodied, satanic head—Capitalism—gleefully eating a human while smoke billows from its stack. Moloch is the name of an ancient Canaanite god who was worshiped through human sacrifice—specifically, the immolation of children.

Less than 100 days in office, Donald Trump appears hell-bent on becoming the most pro-pollution, anti-environmental American president in half a century. From leasing federal lands to the coal industry, to dismantling clean water rules, to reducing fuel efficiency in cars and trucks, the Republicans will make America more toxic and all of our lives shorter, nastier, and more brutish. Twenty years after the Kyoto Protocol, Trump’s regressive war on the planet has made this new version of my old poster feel sadly appropriate.

Screen printed in gloss black on two fluorescent papers by John Sullivan at Logos Graphics in San Francisco. [MF]