Artist Edel Rodriguez is famous for his satirical images of Donald Trump. Since 2016, he’s produced dozens of images of the president in an ultra-simple, pop-art style. But for Rodriguez’s new cover of The New Yorker commemorating Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race, he threw that signature look out the window.
The illustration, which will run on the November 17 issue of The New Yorker, shows Mamdani smiling broadly as he holds onto the handrail on an M train headed to Queens. Around him, New Yorkers of all walks of life—including a young woman with a dog in her bag, a child with her mother, and an elderly gentleman in a fedora—jostle to board and deboard the car. The whole picture is made in expressive, sketch-like lines and depicted in toasty hues of brown and rust orange. It has a hand-drawn, humanistic quality that none of Rodriguez’s illustrations of Trump possess.
“With the Trump stuff, I wanted to create imagery that was so visually basic and a bit dumb—for it to not have any gesture, or line, or anything soft,” he says. The images are meant to be a bit like traffic signs: all symbols and conceptual shapes, intended to get the viewer to pay attention, but not to attract real visual interest. “I actually want you to be repelled by it,” he says.
Looking beyond Trump
During Trump’s first term in office, Rodriguez published over 125 satirical illustrations and 25 magazine covers depicting the President as everything from a massive wrecking ball to a flaming trash can, always in a bright orange hue and typically with an angry-looking, wide open mouth.
As an immigrant born in authoritarian Cuba, Rodriguez’s personal history is deeply tied to his work. Back in 2018, he compared Trump’s rhetoric to that of Fidel Castro’s. At that time, he saw his satirical Trump art as a warning of what was to come. Now, he says, those warnings have come to fruition.
“The frustration with the second Trump term is, like, I already warned you everything I could warn you about and you still voted for this guy,” Rodriguez says. “You’re Latino, and you still voted for this guy. What can I do now? I’m able to find a few ways to tell the story in a different manner, but the purpose of it is different in the second term.”
Most recently, Rodriguez created an image of Trump using the Burger King logo that reads “No King,” an image that was widely used throughout the national No Kings protests. But while he’s continuing to work on imagery of the President, he’s now looking to branch out into other projects that center “less negativity,” he says. When The New Yorker selected him to illustrate its cover of Mamdani, he saw it as an opportunity to work on something more uplifting.
“The difference is night and day. I mean, it’s so much more enjoyable,” Rodriguez says, adding, “When you have an opportunity to do something more positive, it feels good. What I like about [“Mayor Mamdani”] is that it’s positive, but it doesn’t feel like propaganda. It is just showing a scene. I don’t generally like to do anything that says, ‘Vote for this guy.’”
What makes Zohran Mamdani different
Like many of Mamdani’s supporters, Rodriguez first learned about Mamdani through his social media content. Mamdani’s campaign team posted videos of him walking New York City, speaking casually to viewers about his vision for an affordable NYC for all. In one series of videos, Mamdani tried to pitch himself to all New Yorkers by speaking in fluent Bengla and Urdu, as well as in Spanish, a language that he’s still working to learn. Rodriguez was struck by Mamdani’s willingness to leave clips of his own Spanish-speaking errors in the final video—a move that, he says, was a rare choice from a politician that showed Mamdani is “fallible, and not perfect.”
“It’s what made him so popular is that he’s very relatable in many ways,” Rodriguez says. “I think it was that idea of just riding the subway with everyone else and not taking an Uber or a black car around town, or the way he just showed up in bodegas and would do a little video.”
The week before the mayoral election, that idea of Mamdani as a regular New Yorker inspired Rodriguez to reach out to The New Yorker’s longtime art editor, Françoise Mouly, with a few sketches for a potential cover. Having worked with Mouly in the past, Rodriguez says he occasionally sends her ideas “as they pop into my head,” to get her feedback and workshop together.
His rough sketch first ideas included images of Mamdani subway surfing with the New York City skyline behind him; driving a cab across different boroughs; conducting the M train; and riding inside the M train as a passenger. Mouly, and The New Yorker’s editor-in-chief David Remnick, liked the last concept the best.
“I have been talking to artists about the mayoral election for a while,” Mouly says. “Of course it’s a good topic for The New Yorker. Last week, Edel sent a flurry of sketches, anticipating a victory by Mamdani. All of Edel’s ideas showed Mamdani connecting with people everywhere in the five boroughs. The most succinct way to show that was the idea we went with: simply showing him with his bright and winning smile in the melting pot of the subway.”
With Mouly’s final approval, Rodriguez had less than a day to finalize his illustration ahead of the November 4 election. While Rodriguez lives in New Jersey with his wife today, he previously lived in Brooklyn while attending Pratt Institute and later while serving as an art director at Time magazine. During that era, Rodriguez was a frequent subway rider—and, like most art students, had often used the commute to sketch fellow passengers. He used those memories of fellow subway passengers to fill out the scene around Mamdani.
“If you’ve ridden the subway, that’s how it is,” Rodriguez says. “It’s always like, the girl with the bag and the little puppy, and maybe a punk rock kid, and maybe a Hasidic Jew, and then a mom with a kid, and a guy in a hoodie. Whatever character popped into my head as I was drawing, that’s what I drew, pretty much until I filled the page. I probably could have drawn 20 more characters.”
Ultimately, Rodriguez’s work captures a quality Mamdani has managed to convey that most politicians can’t even come close to: relatability.
“We’ve all been on the train—it’s totally packed, it’s not pleasant,” he says. “But if your politician or your mayor is there with you, it just makes him more relatable. I wouldn’t show Andrew Cuomo or Trump that way.”