The New Yorker; Vanity Fair
On Tuesday morning, the art team at The New Yorker was confident that early the following day they would run a cover of their November 18 issue featuring President-elect Kamala Harris. They had several portrait options from various artists prepared. But as the hours of the evening ticked by—and Donald Trump continued to rake in electoral college votes—it became clear that they would need another option.
“We had prepared a wonderful image, which we called ‘Madame President,’” says Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker’s longtime art editor. “I had been asked repeatedly by [editor-in-chief] David Remnick, ‘What’s plan B? What do we do? I don’t want to be caught short the way we were eight years ago.’ But I couldn’t. I literally could not. A lot of what I do is try to capture the feeling, talk to artists, look at sketches, and see what feels right in terms of capturing the feeling of the moment. Last week, it was a failure of the imagination to imagine an overwhelming victory for Trump.”
That sentiment has been echoed by many Democratic voters in the wake of Trump’s win, which included significant nationwide gains for Republicans compared to 2020, even among groups that typically vote Democrat. Many pollsters had predicted a “tight race.” The election results, by contrast, paint a stark picture of a country that has swung markedly to the right.
By 11 p.m. on Tuesday, Mouly was beginning to realize that her team was facing a similar situation as they had in 2016, when Trump won the presidency over Hillary Clinton. From that point on, it was back to the drawing board.
Down to the wire
Cartoonist and illustrator Barry Blitt has created more than 100 covers for The New Yorker, most of which highlight his signature caricature style and humorous point of view. He’s worked under plenty of tight deadlines in his career, but this time, he says, was probably the “quickest I’ve ever finished a drawing.”
The New Yorker wasn’t entirely unprepared for a Trump victory. The weekend prior to the election, Mouly had asked Blitt to draft a few potential sketches for that outcome.
“I drew up a stack of maybe five or six possible Trump covers, one of which was a play on a great cover that [Mouly] did with Art Spiegelman after 9/11, which was a black-on-black image of the towers with words that were barely perceptible. It was quite moving,” Blitt says. “When it looked like Trump was far enough ahead, she called me and said, ‘Why don’t we go ahead with that particular sketch that you sent. But let’s just do it black on white’”.
From Mouly’s perspective, the most effective element of Blitt’s original sketch was the “visceral,” emotive nature of the silhouette.
“It wasn’t a composed image; there was something so gestural about it that it worked. It felt different from more elaborate constructions,” Mouly says. “I asked [Blitt] to just take a piece of paper and some ink and do that again. Do it small, don’t even spend much time on it. Spew it out”.
After talking with Mouly, Blitt got out his ink and made three new drafts to send in. “Thankfully,” he says, “I’ve drawn Trump so many times that just drawing his outline was something I could handle at 11 o’clock at night.” By 11:45, the concepts were back to Mouly. In the morning, Blitt was surprised to find that the cover had already been published, and texts regarding the work were rolling in from friends.
“The most humorless image Blitt has ever done”
The finished cover shows a dark, looming side silhouette of Trump against a crisp white background—almost resembling an ink blot or stain. His head blocks the majority of the magazine’s title. The New Yorker’s website describes the work as “a reminder that a second term, though bound to include more moves from his all too familiar far-right playbook, will also undoubtedly usher in a new era of unprecedented extremism and intensified uncertainty in America”.
Other magazines were quick to the scene, too. Time published its November 25 cover on Wednesday morning, featuring a photo of Trump delivering his election speech. With a minimally edited image and a simple headline, the cover follows a tradition for Time spanning back to 1924. Its brightly lit, patriotic color scheme draws a sharp contrast to The New Yorker’s somber take.
Vanity Fair took a more stylized approach, spotlighting a macro close-up of Trump’s face with the text, “34 felony counts. 1 conviction. 2 cases pending. 2 impeachments. 6 bankruptcies. 4 more years”.
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Looking back on Tuesday night, Mouly says she “intellectually, should have prepared” herself for the results. Still, she says, “I really do not believe that an image that primal could have been thought through until the moment came.
“It ended up being the most somber, humorless image that [Blitt] has ever done,” Mouly continues. “It had all the humor squeezed out of it, which is what the situation required”.
Fonte Fast Company
