This strip was created in February/March of 2017 and appeared in issue #199 of Linux (Pro) Magazine. It’s the second of a pair of satirical strips for which we decided to represent contemporary political events as though they were the man pages of Unix commands. At this time Donald Trump had recently been elected, was still talking up his idea of a wall between the US and Mexico, and was trying to introduce a travel ban for passengers from several mostly muslim countries.

We also took the opportunity to reference the long-held usage of the word “trump” in the UK.

We also decided to abandon our usual Elvie border for these strips, presenting them just as images of monitors on the page. In this case the usual Elvie logo was dropped entirely, being replaced with the username at the top right of the screen; and the license and web address information was implemented as a post-it note stuck to the monitor’s frame.

Also, unlike most of our strips, this one was largely assembled in The GIMP, with Inkscape used to set the main text.

Fork this comic (or just grab the source files) on GitHub

↓ Transcript
[Single panel showing the Unix man page for a hypothetical "Trump" command]

NAME
trump - replacement for systemd

DESCRIPTION
On an en-US locale: tries to harden
firewall rules to prevent non-ASCII data
entering the machine from .ir, .ly, .so,
.sd, .sy and .ye domains. Creates a new
firewall to block entry from .mx domains.

Changes database collations such that
queries always return "America" first.

While trump is active, data from /media
will be flagged as untrusted.

This command creates a new key binding:
ALT-RIGHT immediately moves the cursor
to the far right.

Running this command multiple times may
return different, even conflicting,
results on each invocation.

Trump accepts no arguments.

On an en-GB locale: Emits a farting sound
from the speaker.