"I understand that you have to maintain a certain neutrality," he says, sitting among a smattering of his illustrations, including on the covers of The New Yorker and the French review America.
"But you always have to ask yourself when is the neutrality going too far, and I felt that being neutral with Trump in 2016 was not the right thing to do, because I could see what was coming."
Rodriguez has depicted Trump like a meteor about to smash Earth, or a child sitting atop a missile with North Korea's Kim Jong Un.
And like other artists, he has also depicted Trump with symbols of the Ku Klux Klan, particularly when the 45th president failed to condemn white supremacist activists who attacked anti-racism demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017.
Per Rodriguez, the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol building by Trump supporters lent credence to the notion that danger was brewing and neutrality was moot.
"We were this close to a coup," he says.
Rodriguez's own story feeds his work: as a nine-year-old he fled Fidel Castro's Cuba with his parents.
In a comic book to be published this fall, he recounts his experience with "dictatorship" and the Mariel boat lift of 1980 in which he migrated to Florida, which saw a mass exodus of Cubans.
Rodriguez feels that Trump brought out the worst in people, creating an image of the United States that contrasted with his own experience: "I know how good the people in this country are," he says.
He says he draws inspiration from his family and Cuba but also the work of Picasso, Matisse, or Paul Klee.
In drawing Trump, he uses recurring visual codes, like orange skin, bright yellow hair, an open, yelling mouth, and a lack of eyes.
"These covers that I create don't normalize (him) and they show him as who he is," Rodriguez said.
