It might not be so far-fetched to think that Donald Trump will soon be on the cover of every magazine on the newsstand. Currently, we’re talking the politics section — and here’s what we found:
Economist
Last week, the Economist dressed Trump in an Uncle Sam costume with the caption “Really?” as it castigated his GOP rivals for playing nice for too long. This week, it’s rapping further on Trump’s rise in America, likening it to the anti-immigrant “dirty right” in France. Getting down to brass tacks, the Lexington column says Trump is “making promises to his supporters that are both nasty and impossible to keep,” a trick of old hucksters like Jean-Marie Le Pen, it argues. “Dismayingly, attacks on Muslims and Mexicans do not set Republican nerves a-jangle.” Wagging its finger over Trump’s fascist flavors, however, the paper fails to address the awkward fact that his rise has also been fueled by voter frustration over the domestic job-killing, free-trade policies tirelessly promoted by, above all, the Economist.
National Review
National Review, which until recently had been particularly distinguished in its denial of the Trump threat, risks the appearance of thrusting its head back into the sand with a cover devoted to a retrospective on Justice Antonin Scalia. We wonder what the late Scalia (and the magazine’s famously Roman Catholic founder William F. Buckley, for that matter) would have thought of its branding Pope Francis a “publicity hound” in the pope’s recent run-in with Trump. Elsewhere, there’s a head-scratching column by Reihan Salam that argues technology will ease the pain of globalization for Americans by allowing, for example, their children to be taught by low-wage teachers in India without those teachers having to actually move to America (no mention of the problem of US teaching jobs).
New Republic
The New Republic got sold last month for a presumable pittance to a lit magazine nobody ever heard of. Why? After decades of delightful unpredictability in its political coverage from writers like Michael Kinsley and Leon Wieseltier, a Facebook founder bought it four years ago and turned it into a shrieky, knee-jerky haven for frustrated leftist grad students. A column by Brian Beutler is determined, for example, to prove that “anti-immigration sentiment is not driven by economic anxiety,” but instead by racism. “Trump is wealthy, many of his most influential supporters are also wealthy,” and thus not worried about keeping a job at Home Depot, the argument seems to be. Correct us if the stats recently shifted, but we had thought the ranks of wealthy GOP aligned against Trump seriously outnumber his wealthy supporters.
Rolling Stone
Nobody shrieks quite like Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, and his conclusion on the Trump phenomenon is that “big media” is to blame. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes, failing to address the wider implications of this florid metaphor. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.” Self-righteous and self-congratulatory as ever, Taibbi nevertheless makes a point. And, we have to hand it to Taibbi for naming names, in this case MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who the day after Trump won New Hampshire, “launched into a minute-long homily about how happy he was to be a bug on the windshield of the Trump phenomenon,” according to Taibbi. Elsewhere, there’s a feature on why Elton John is so happy these days.
New York
New York this week has the usual snotty, feckless droning on the Trump conversation. Jonathan Chait decries his exploitation of “the atavistic fears of the white working class,” as if this group has nothing to legitimately fear about its economic future. Indeed, the only worthwhile read here is Gabriel Sherman’s reporting on whether Mike Bloomberg might enter the Presidential race. In it, we learn that Bloomberg clamped down on his news outfit’s coverage of his own political ambitions, as well as “personal attacks” on Trump after The Donald sent him a “scathing letter” last spring complaining about a column. “If you were putting down Donald Trump in your piece, you would get special scrutiny,” a source told Sherman.
New Yorker
New Yorker editor David Remnick makes note of Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin. “Pull the camera back, and Trump can be viewed as part of a deadly serious wave of authoritarians and xenophobes who have come to power in Russia, Poland, and Hungary,” Remnick writes. Interesting, but he quickly reverts to the usual argument about Trump being a big chicken coming home to roost for a secretly racist GOP. Elsewhere, check out the takedown of the Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein, who has benefited richly from the so-called “carried-interest” tax loophole.
Time
Time takes a ride in Trump Force One, the tricked-out 757 used by the tycoon to crisscross the country in his campaign. “It’s not the polls. It’s the ratings,” Trump tells reporter David Von Drehle. When news networks cover him, “the ratings double. They triple,” Trump says. “And that gives you power.” Indeed, this insightful, yet otherwise frothy and favorable, profile was placed ahead of a far more critical piece that accuses Trump of being a “tribal warrior” with a record of race-baiting to defeat competing casino projects by Indian tribes, for example.