Trump Shares Imperialist Newsweek Cover, Seemingly Unaware of Satirical Intent

When a sitting president shares a satirical magazine cover depicting him as a colossus of imperial conquest — and does so with pride — the satire has not failed to land so much as it has revealed something the satirists did not intend to reveal: that the subject does not share the moral premises upon which the critique depends. The Newsweek cover, consciously echoing an 1892 Punch cartoon that skewered Cecil Rhodes' colonial greed, was designed to wound through historical comparison. That it instead became self-promotion suggests we are in a moment where the vocabulary of shame no longer trave