The left-wing cartoonist Garry Trudeau responded to Donald Trump’s entrance into the contest for the Republican presidential nomination this summer with a Sunday strip about—being a cartoonist. “Folks, as I’m sure you can imagine, political cartooning is an extremely demanding gig!” says his cartoon alter ego in the first panel. “It takes its toll!” Then, in the second, third, fourth, and fifth panels we see the same figure, against appropriate backdrops, saying: “On the other hand, could there possibly be a more inspiring place to make art than this great land of ours? It’s got everything! Your spacious skies, your shining seas, your purple mountain majesties and your amber waves of grain!” Then, in the final panel, we see the amber waves of grain transformed into the celebrated Trump comb-over with the diminutive figure of the cartoonist, perched like a louse in the middle of it and saying: “Then there’s your low-hanging fruit . . . ”

Obviously, it has never occurred to Garry Trudeau that there could be any other reaction than mirth to anything Mr. Trump might say or do. Nor for his audience. That is presumably what he means by “low-hanging fruit.” The corollary of this unexamined assumption is, of course, that anyone with a different reaction, and especially anyone taking the tycoon-turned-politician seriously, would not be numbered among his audience. Such people, if any such people there be, can be written off as worthy only of the same contempt merited by Mr. Trump himself.