New Yorker Cover Shows History Is Already Harshly Judging Donald Trump

The New Yorker has done it again.

"Bad Reception ," the cover illustration for the magazine's Feb. 1 issue, shows past U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Washington watching present-day presidential hopeful Donald Trump blathering on TV.

Their expressions range from shock and disgust to confusion and shame. 

Check it out:

"In most historical portraits, Presidents are noble and dignified,” Barry Blitt, the artist who drew the cover illustration, said in a brief New Yorker story about the cover. “My biggest challenge was to alter the Presidents’ expressions to make them reflect attitudes of consternation.”

Blitt is no stranger to attention-grabbing New Yorker covers. He was responsible for the magazine's controversial July 21, 2008 cover, "The Politics of Fear ," which featured then-presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed in stereotypical Muslim garb and fist-bumping Michelle Obama, who was caricatured as an Afro-sporting, AK-47-toting black radical.

The cover followed former Fox News anchor E.D. Hill's infamous declaration that Michelle Obama had given the president a "terrorist fist-jab " as he approached the podium to accept the Democratic presidential nomination in June 2008.  

Of course, as Mother Jones' Tim Murphy notes , most of the presidents featured on the latest New Yorker cover didn't exactly have glowing track records when it came to civil rights and racial equality.

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