America First: Trump Beheading Statue Of Liberty On German Magazine Cover Sparks Criticism

When German magazine Der Spiegel revealed it’s latest cover image Friday, it pummeled across the internet in a cloud of controversy. The cover depicts a striking image: The unmistakeable figure of President Donald Trump holding a knife in one hand and the Statue of Liberty’s head in another dripping with blood. In the illustration, he has no eyes, no nose, but his mouth is open as if he’s letting out a battle cry. The artwork has a simple caption: “America First.”

It didn’t take long for the cover to attract criticism.

Bild, a German tabloid, pointed out a parallel between the image of Trump with a Islamic State filter known as “Jihadi John,” who was known for beheading prisoners.

The art was in “bad taste” and it “plays on the lives of terror victims in a very nasty manner” Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, vice-president of the European Parliament, told Bild Friday.

Another German publication, Liberal conservative broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, weighed in as well: “The Spiegel cover is just what Trump needs — a distorted image of him which he can use to further his own distorted image of the press.”

For his part, Klaus Brinkbäumer, the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, stood by the cover.

“Donald Trump has now been president of the United States for two weeks,” he wrote in an editorial. “It literally pains me to write about all that has happened in these first days. The president of the U.S. is a racist. He is attempting a coup from the top; he wants to establish an illiberal democracy, or worse; he wants to undermine the balance of power.”

This isn’t the first time Der Spiegel sharply criticized the U.S. president with its art. After the election in November, the magazine published a cover that showed Trump’s head plunging toward Earth with the caption, "The End of the World (as we know it),” referring to the 1987 R.E.M. song.

The artist of both covers is Edel Rodriguez, who immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba in 1980 as a political refugee.

“It's a beheading of democracy, a beheading of a sacred symbol,” Rodriguez told the Washington Post of his latest cover. “And clearly, lately, what's associated with beheadings is ISIS, so there's a comparison… Both sides are extremists, so I'm just making a comparison between them.”