Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz responds to Donald Trump’s ‘bad hombres’ debate line

Republican nominee Donald Trump had several newsworthy lines at the third and final 2016 US presidential debate in Las Vegas. 

Like when he refused to say whether he would accept the result of the vote on Nov. 8. “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, OK?” Trump said.

But another expression Trump used during the debate really set Twitter on fire. Trump was talking about the steps he would take as president to set his immigration policy into motion.

"One of my first will be to get all of the drug lords, all of the bad ones. We have some bad, bad people in this country that have to go out,” Trump said. “We’re going to get them out. We're going to secure the border. And once the border is secured, at a later date, we'll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here, and we're going to get them out."

Trump’s use of “bad hombres” — "hombres" being Spanish for "men" — apparently prompted a surge of inquiries about the phrase at the Merriam-Webster website. And of course, the tweets marked #badhombres started flowing.

“When I first heard Trump say ‘bad hombres’ it was like the VP debate, when [Republican vice-presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence] said ‘you just whipped out that Mexican thing again.’ I knew it was going to be the line of the night,” says Mexican American political cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz.

Alcaraz quickly got to work producing a couple of "bad hombres” cartoons. The first is the one shown at the top of this post.

"It consists of Trump on a balcony dressed as a Latin American dictator, like a generalissimo," Alcaraz says. “And then he has this big ceremonial sash, and it just says ‘bad hombre.’”

Alcaraz admits he’s focused much of his cartooning on Trump this year. And he says that's because he objects to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

“This has been a really weird election year. I’m not sure that I’ve ever gone after one candidate so much," Alcaraz says. "I’m not the most balanced cartoonist out there. But seriously this is worrisome. This guy is one bad hombre.”

So for his second "bad hombre" cartoon, Alcaraz chose to create an image in the style of an Old West wanted poster.