A magazine in Germany featured a jaw-dropping cover photo of President Donald Trump giving a Nazi salute.
Hamburg-based magazine Stern portrayed Trump draped in an American flag while giving the chilling Nazi solute. The cover features a bold faced headline that read “Sein Kampf,” which means “his struggle” in German. The phrase is a reference to Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf.
https://twitter.com/AndrewBeatty/status/900404802001268737
The dig at the American president is a response to the public’s recent backlash toward Trump’s reaction to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week, where a white supremacist rally turned violent. Trump’s half-hearted condemnation of neo-Nazis and white supremacists became the subject of widespread media criticism, but no news outlet took it as far as Stern. The Economist‘s portrayal of Trump holding a megaphone designed to look like a Ku Klux Klan hood almost seems innocuous compared to the Hitler-inspired cover.
Our cover this week pic.twitter.com/lYD3HLXvSC
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 17, 2017
They definitely weren’t playing games when they decided on this cover. After all, Stern even claims Trump is brewing “hate in America.”
“Neo-nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Racism: As Donald Trump stirs the hate in America,” a translation of the cover reads.
The unrest in Charlottesville left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and numerous injured in the aftermath of the neo-Nazi-organized demonstration. Trump first dismissed the matter by claiming it was the fault of “many sides,” which resulted in a public outcry.
The president then updated his statement by saying, “‘Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to what we hold dear as Americans.”
Trump walked back from that hard-line stance the following day during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York City, where he said there were “very fine people” participating with both neo-Nazis and counterprotesters. Trump also blamed “both sides” for engaging in violence—a claim that is true but negates the purpose of the president’s statement at a time when literal Nazis are walking in the street of America.