New Yorker cover bluntly tackles Trump’s racist rhetoric
The New Yorker has gone after President Donald Trump with withering satire all year, so the magazine wasn’t going to pull any punches after the commander in chief’s “on many sides” rhetoric in the wake of last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville. “Trump and KKK on the cover of the New Yorker? It has come to that,” New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly told the Washington Post of the magazine’s latest cover art, “Blowhard.”
“We can’t let the images be too timid,” she continued.
“When the president of the United States equivocates on matters of hate and xenophobia, artists should not.”
The unequivocating person behind the new piece is first-time New Yorker cover artist David Plunkert, who notes that he seldoms draws political subject matter, but was moved to do so given the White House’s response to the protest and tragedy.
“Transforming and twisting recog- nizable objects into visual ideas is my favourite kind of imagery to work on,” the Baltimore-based Plunkert said.
“That said, the actual story being illustrated is a bit of a national tragedy and an embarrassment.” In recent months, Trump has appeared on the magazine’s cover as a gear-grinding clown in Barry Blitt’s spoof of Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and in Blitt’s Putin spoof of the magazine’s iconic cartoon dandy, “Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley.”