It’s a good New York Times editorial (here) and the illustration tries to convey the essence of the message: the Republican party is being led by the “backbench bomb throwers” of the Freedom Caucus with a twisted message, a stunt that is “ridiculous, unfounded, and poisonous to the Republic.” It makes for an eye-catching picture for the tiny thumbnail version on the main page.
The Republican Party is portrayed as an elephant with an elongated trunk wrapped around a front leg, looped in the middle, going around a back leg, and tied in a tight knot at the end. I'm not sure why the artist, Lucy Jones (who may be a journalist for the UK Sun since I can't find her listed as a artist elsewhere) had the trunk knotted at the end.
I would have drawn it this way:
Here are the final paragraphs of the piece from the editorial board of the New York Times.
These backbench bomb-throwers came to power on an explicit promise to stop President Barack Obama from achieving his goals and, as a bonus, to punish any Republican lawmaker showing even the slightest inclination to cooperate with the opposition. Conflict and obstructionism have always been their purpose, fueled by their relentless message that government is always the problem, that all experts are idiots, that cultural and coastal elites hate Real Americans and that all of Washington is corrupt and broken beyond repair. Except themselves, of course.
As has often been noted, Mr. Trump did not invent the apocalyptic message that he has used to dazzle the Republican base. He merely distilled it to its essence. But the base had been groomed for his arrival for years, in no small part by lawmakers like Mr. Meadows and Mr. Jordan, who have repeatedly proved eager to tear down democratic institutions in the service of their own political aims.
So while the Freedom Caucus’s pitiful effort to oust Mr. Rosenstein should not be taken seriously on practical grounds, it is a tragic reminder of the bleak path down which the Republican Party has been slouching in recent years. The rot was there long before Mr. Trump showed up to exploit it, and it is likely to remain long after he is gone.