The American magazine New Yorker has offered an early look at the cover of its new 4 March issue titled: “The Real Emergency”.
The cover sports US President Donald Trump standing on the roof of an almost submerged White House, having failed to find shelter from the looming storm. He is carrying a red placard captioned with an imperative: “finish the wall”, referring to the wall that Trump seeks to erect on the country’s southern border to solve the migration crisis there.
The cover is meant to show that a real state of emergency consists in the consequences of climate change, the author Barry Blitt shared.
“It seems like our President is pouring his energies (such as they are) into a fake emergency”, Blitt was cited by the New Yorker as saying, “while denying the existence of a potentially catastrophic crisis like climate change”.
In October, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world had no more than a dozen years to put an end to global warming, with failure in this regard increasing the risk of drought and extreme poverty for millions.
The cover of the new issue couldn’t go unnoticed on Twitter, with users giving a thumbs-up and eagerly sharing the news and pictures:
Others, meanwhile, obviously take it with a pinch of salt:
One user remarked, tongue-in-cheek, that since it is not specified which wall is to be completed, “Mueller is coming to build a wall” around Trump.
Others focused on minute details in the image, for instance, the direction in which the flag and Trump’s necktie are waving.
“Ha! man of War”, one antagonist wrote.
In mid-February, Trump signed a national emergency declaration in a bid to finally secure funds necessary to build a border wall on the US-Mexico border to stem the influx of illegal migrants. Trump, who has prioritised the issue among other pressing ones since his 2016 election campaign, thereby ended a lengthy government shutdown, which occurred as a result of the Republican-Democratic impasse in Congress over border security funding.
By declaring a national emergency, Trump will be able to tap into certain Pentagon funds, including its military construction and counter-narcotics budgets, to build 243 miles of steel barrier on the southern border, according to a senior administration official cited by media.