A new round of magazine covers rip Trump for his Charlottesville stance

The American press fires back
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
A new round of magazine covers rip Trump for his Charlottesville stance
Getty Images/Mashable Composite

UPDATED (4:00 p.m. ET): Updated to include the New Yorker cover.


It's been a tumultuous, chaotic week following the violence in Charlottesville over the weekend. As outrage at Donald Trump's comments continues to simmer, magazine covers are putting the president on blast.

None more so than the new cover from The Economist, which bluntly takes Trump to task for the way he equated Charlottesville protesters with the white supremacists that have long supported him and who were responsible for the deadly violence in Charlottesville.

Yep, that's Trump using a KKK hood as a megaphone, a stark, powerful image that needs no further explanation.

The corresponding story unleashes equal scorn on the president, pointing out that, although Trump denounced the KKK and other white supremacy groups, "his unsteady response contains a terrible message for Americans. Far from being the saviour of the Republic, their president is politically inept, morally barren, and temperamentally unfit for office."

The new cover from The New Yorker, for its August 28th issue, uses a similar KKK motif to The Economist, and just as brutal.

In a story on the mag's site, artist David Plunkert says of the cover, “President Trump’s weak pushback to hate groups—as if he was trying not to alienate them as voters—compelled me to take up my pen."

TIME has also revealed its newest cover, returning to the animated versions that they've used previously to criticize the Trump administration.

This time, while it's clear that the topic is the fallout from Charlottesville and the emboldened stance of white supremacists thanks to Trump's electoral victory, its approach is less directly critical of Trump — though it certainly still holds him responsible.

In a story linked with the cover, TIME managing editor Nancy Gibbs makes clear that, yes, Trump is responsible for this.

...his rebuke on Aug. 14 of the KKK and neo-fascists looked like a hostage video. On Aug. 15, he appeared more authentically appalled by the counterprotesters, more concerned about the "very fine people" objecting to statues being removed than the woman who was killed. Past Presidents risked everything to fight the Nazis; this one provided them cover.

It's still early in the publishing cycle for most magazines, particularly those that have previously used their covers to levy criticism at Trump. We can surely expect more to come.

Newspapers are in the game, too. The New York Daily News, which has garnered fame (or infamy, depending on your point of view) for its front pages critical of Trump, led the charge with a Wednesday cover that took dead aim at Trump's sympathy for white nationalists.

Whether or not these powerful statements from the American press fall on deaf ears is another matter entirely.

Mashable Image
Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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