I'll Handle Them, Mr. President

About

I'll Handle Them, Mr. President is a political cartoon by Tom Garrahan in which an armed man in a MAGA hat watches Donald Trump's speech on TV, replying "I'll handle them, Mr. President" while holding a rifle. Posted in 2019, the cartoon has since gained virality as an exploitable meme format, with the man vowing to do the bidding of various people and characters edited over the television. The text in the speech bubbles is also commonly recaptioned in memes.

Origin

On August 3rd, 2019, cartoonist Tom "righthandedleftyartist" Garrahan published a cartoon depicting an armed man in a MAGA hat listening to Donald Trump complaining about "horrible people" in a televised speech, responding to him, "I'll handle them, Mr. President" (shown below, original Instagram^[1] post no longer available). On that day, Redditor pm_me_your_pets24 reposted the image to the /r/PoliticalHumor^[2] subreddit, where it garnered over 17,800 upvotes in six months.

Spread

On August 4th, 2019, GotFunnyPictures^[3] user David "Garsedj" Touchdown posted the earliest known edit of the cartoon, replacing Donald Trump with the Lorax. The post gained over 5,300 views and 80 upvotes on the site in four years (shown below).

The format did not see further spread until March 2021. On March 13th, 2021, Twitter^[4] user @NuclearOutPoint posted a now-deleted Tomato Town Massacre meme using the format that received over 2,400 retweets and 25,400 likes prior to removal (shown below, left).

The format maintained moderate prevalence online in 2022 and 2023. For example, on September 28th, 2022, an unknown Redditor posted a Wario meme that accumulated over 7,200 upvotes on /r/okbuddyretard^[5] in 10 months (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References