New Yorker Is Second Magazine To Couple Trump With KKK Hood

The artist says Trump’s "weak pushback to hate groups ... compelled me to take up my pen."

President Donald Trump blows ... on the The New Yorker’s latest cover.

The magazine’s upcoming edition features a cartoon by David Plunkert that has Trump blowing the sail of a ship ― a sail that happens to resemble the white hood of a Ku Klux Klan member.

“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,” Plunkert told The New Yorker.

The magazine’s art editor, Francoise Mouly, wrote that Plunkert “seldom takes on political subject matter.” But, she added, he “felt moved to do so in light of Trump’s response” to last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked by white nationalists protesting a push for the removal from a city park of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Said Plunkert: “A picture does a better job showing my thoughts than words do; it can have a light touch on a subject that’s extremely scary.”

Trump on Saturday blamed “many sides” for the clashes in Charlottesville that included a car ramming into a crowd of counterprotesters. A 32-year-old woman was killed, and a 20-year-old white supremacist has been charged with second-degree murder in the attack. Two on-duty Virginia state troopers also died Saturday when their helicopter crashed on Charlottesville’s outskirts.

Trump, after being criticized for not specifically condemning hate groups such as the KKK and neo-Nazis who were in Charlottesville, did so in a statement Monday. But then he created more furor during a combative press conference Tuesday when he again called out “both sides” for the violence.

He also said: “You have people who are very fine people on both sides.”

The New Yorker’s cover follows one for The Economist this week, which features an equally pointed image: The president using a Ku Klux Klan hood as a megaphone in an illustration by Jon Berkeley.

Before You Go

A Day in the Life of the KKK

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