DC sheet storm

The Economist raised eyebrows with its cover this week, which depicts Donald Trump using a pointy Ku Klux Klan hood as a megaphone.

But inside, it takes pains to say Trump is not a white supremacist.

Always thinking creatively, it finds other reasons to attack Trump’s character, arguing, for example, that he is not a Republican, but rather the solo star of his own drama.

This view, we would submit, doesn’t entirely square with the stats they put forward in the same article, including a tally finding that 80 percent of Republicans support him.

Maybe, just maybe, the real problem is that Trump isn’t the kind of Wall Street Republican that The Economist prefers.

Elsewhere, the prim weekly downplays the white supremacist threat generally.

In an article titled,“Rogue’s Gal- lery,” it says there were 4 million Ku Klux Klan members in 1925 and only 5,000 to 8,000 today. That may be true, but Trump’s anti-immigrant views also won him the presidency.

For all of its supposedly indepth analysis of the issue, the closest The Economist ever gets to an up close and personal view of the Charlottesville tragedy is in its obituary for Heather Heyer.

In this week’s “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker editor David Remnick casts President Trump as “The Divider” — a name that sounds nice compared to the rest of the stuff Remnick says.

The magazine’s boss laments what he calls Trump’s “indulgent sympathy for neo-Nazis, Klan members, and unaffiliated white supremacists.”

That was on display in the lobby of the Trump Tower, Remnick writes, when the president went off script last Tuesday and pandered to “the basest of his base,” adding that the US has elected a “dishonest, inept, unbalanced, and immoral human being as its president.”

Elswhere, there is a 14-page piece about Carl Icahn and the billionaire investor’s potential conflicts of interest as a special adviser to the president.

In “Trump’s Favorite Tycoon,” author Patrick Radden Keefe focuses on Icahn’s interest in a Texas refinery and how its stock nearly doubled on post-election expectations of a favorable rule change on renewable fuels.

Icahn resigned as a Trump adviser on Friday — three days before the article was to be posted online — in a move, he said, to prevent “partisan bickering.”