Last week, Twitter retrieved the comic strip above a 1999 Doonesbury classic in which Garry Trudeau, the strips creator, saw Donald Trump The Candidate coming a mile away.

Trudeau has been drawing the racist GOP presidential nominee since 1987. This strip appears in an anthology of cartoons called Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump , which came out in July. Trudeau responded to questions about the viral strip, his career and the book by email on Friday.

Your 1999 strip went viral , so much so that the myth-busting site Snopes created an entry to dispel the rumor that you predicted the Trump presidency. Youve been drawing Trump for almost 30 years. Could you talk about the first time you drew him? What in particular made you want to satirize him?

Ive never had a strip fragment go viral before, so maybe punchlines are overrated. This one appeared 12 years after Trump made his initial head-fake toward the White House, which is what first prompted me to write about him. Hes been running election simulations in his head his entire life, but it took Twitter to put the dream within reach. My first raw impression? Biggest. Asshole. Ever. Must draw.

Over the summer, you published an anthology of your Trump cartoons, Yuge . What observations did you make going through those old strips? How has Trumps narrative changed through the decades, if at all? Or how has he not changed?

The underlying pathology has been remarkably stable. Trump himself has said that hes changed little from grade school, where he punched out his music teacher. Ive always felt that this election comes down to a referendum on mental health. The GOP candidate displays the classic symptoms of a sociopath grandiosity, manipulative behavior, chronic lying, lack of empathy, etc. whereas Mrs. Clinton does not. Its true that Im not a trained psychiatric professional. But Im also not a trained ornithologist, and yet I know a duck when I see one.