New Yorker Cover Shows History Is Already Harshly Judging Donald Trump

George Washington is literally face-palming.

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 this New Yorker cover illustration, past U.S. presidents watch GOP front-runner Donald Trump on TV -- and do not like what they see.
In this New Yorker cover illustration, past U.S. presidents watch GOP front-runner Donald Trump on TV -- and do not like what they see.
Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

"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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