A spate of liberal magazines unleashed their fury at Donald Trump’s post-Charlottesville remarks with artistic covers mocking Trump with Ku Klux Klan hoods and Nazi salutes. On Tuesday, The Washington Post celebrated the liberal trend – and never, ever called it liberal. They were merely “internationally prominent.”
The headline in bold, large type was a quote: “We can’t let the images be too timid,” and the subtitle was “Magazines use provocative imagery after Trump’s comments about participants in the Charlottesville confrontations.”
Time draped an American flag over a Heil Hitler salute with the words “HATE IN AMERICA.” The New Yorker placed the president on a sail boat and the swollen sail was a Klan hood. The Economist (from the U.K.) had Trump yelling into a megaphone that was a Klan hood. And Der Spiegel, the leftist German “news” magazine just had a man in a Klan hood in a suit with Trump’s trademark red tie, titled “Trump’s True Face.”
It doesn’t matter one whit that the president actually denounced neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Denials never move the needle. Trump said there were “fine people” on both sides of the protests, and the die was cast.
Post writer Michael Cavna began with New Yorker art director Francoise Mouly, the woman who warned in the headline against timid images. She commissioned a Baltimore artist to portray “the president floating in a boat in open water, futilely puffing into his Ku Klux Klan hood of a sail.”
Speaking of futility – do the liberal magazine editors ever consider that they did all this same “resisting” against Trump before the election, and it didn’t exactly turn out the way they wanted? Or it is simply their job to take money from liberals to keep them in a warm bubble of self-satisfaction?
We have moved into a phase in which The New Yorker’s art was just one of at least four internationally prominent magazine covers last week that invoked KKK and Nazi symbology to comment upon the White House through bold, graphically stark illustration….
All four covers rapidly made the rounds on social media, but what we are seeing behind them is also intriguing: Magazine editors and illustrators — some of whom have strong ties to foreign shores and the immigrant experience — are feeling compelled to comment on Trump, and that artwork is finding large audiences hungry for such pictorially concise content.
In other words, liberals. But that apparently can’t be written.
Countless words have been expelled to try to deconstruct, defend or diagnose Trump, says the Paris-born Mouly, who also edits the Resist! newspaper that has spotlighted female artists and women’s rights issues since the inauguration. Sometimes, when a historically polarizing figure is in power, she notes, it is visual art that can speak most directly to readers, cutting through the verbal swamp like a precision strike.
Cavna even noted this mockery was used before the election, to little effect….although to be fair, Der Spiegel covers routinely portrayed Bush and Cheney as the vilest of villains, so the shock value can wear off. At Inauguration time, The Economist ran a cover of Trump the insurgent throwing a Molotov cocktail. Cavna added:
And [Edel] Rodriguez, who was born in Cuba, was already drawing Trump beneath a Klan hood last year for Der Spiegel during Trump’s debates with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and after Trump insulted the Khan “gold star” military family.
“At this point, putting him in a KKK hood is liberating. There’s no leap to make,” the New York artist told HuffPost last week. “He has stood up for white supremacists, Nazis and the KKK like no president before. It’s shameful and disgusting.”
One viral Time cover that Rodriguez created in October, titled “Total Meltdown” and depicting Trump’s face melting like candle wax, was named the cover of the year by the American Society of Magazine Editors. At the awards ceremony last February, Time Editor in Chief Nancy Gibbs told the gathering: “The word ‘magazine’ shares a root with the medieval French word for a warehouse, a treasury, or a place to store ammunition. It suggests a container for that which is useful, valuable, sometimes dangerous.
“This is where we all live now, and why magazines matter more than ever.”
Or maybe magazines have never mattered less than right now, considering Trump was elected and magazines keep losing circulation.
