This past week, U.S. President Donald Trump was formally implicated in felonies, which is big news. His former lawyer Michael Cohen told a court in New York that he’d illegally peddled hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money at Trump’s direction. Famed publication The New Yorker is commemorating the development with a new Trump-focused cover.
In the cover art, adorning the front of the still upcoming September 3 issue of the publication, Trump can be seen walking through a forest, looking anxiously behind him at a pack of bloodhounds hot on his trail. Artist Barry Blitt crafted the piece, calling it “Closing In.”
Check it out below.
An early look at next week’s cover, “Closing In,” by Barry Blitt: https://t.co/QD0xFXhLCY pic.twitter.com/VSQ9ulbS3P
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) August 24, 2018
The same artist has produced more than a dozen other Trump-focused covers for The New Yorker in the past as part of his decades of work for the publication. (He’s contributed since 1994).
Some of his others commemorate moments including the firing of FBI Director James Comey and escalating Trump World tension over the meeting Donald Trump Jr. and others had with Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in 2016. In the mid-May 2017 cover featuring Comey, a dressed up Jeff Sessions drags an annoyed looking FBI director down the aisle of an airplane (thereby tying into another national news story of a doctor getting dragged off his flight).
In the cover art focusing on fallout from the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Veselnitskaya, Trump can be seen kicking son-in-law Jared Kushner on the steps leading out of Air Force One while he angrily pulls Donald Trump Jr. along by the ear behind him. Both men were present at the contentious 2016 meeting, and in the time since it came to light, Trump has worked to protect his son’s name (to no avail).
The inspiration for Blitt’s latest cover is pretty clear. Although Trump has railed incessantly against Cohen in the time since the lawyer’s guilty plea, he can’t get away from the fact that he was implicated in felonies.
In addition — on the same afternoon Cohen pleaded guilty — a jury in Virginia found his former campaign manager Paul Manafort guilty of eight counts of fraud. Manafort, who’s been in police custody for months, faces a second trial later this year in Washington, D.C., for some of the political aspects to his work for pro-Kremlin interests that initially earned him so much scrutiny.
In the face of these developments, Blitt’s depiction of Trump as anxiously looking behind him as bloodhounds get closer and closer is fitting. Trump has lashed out at the investigations closing in around him time and time again at this point. The Russia investigation in particular is one of his continued favorite targets, in addition to the news media like The New Yorker as a whole.
As for the Cohen case, Trump has lashed out at the lawyer himself, deriding him for his decision to plead guilty and suggesting that he was lying about the president’s involvement in the criminal scheme that brought him down. It’s not, though, as if the president is trustworthy, having lied literally thousands and thousands of documented times since taking office. He just keeps making his way through those metaphorical woods.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
