Newsweek’s Trump Cover Revives the 1892 “Rhodes Colossus” Cartoon

Newsweek International’s cover showing Donald Trump towering over North and South America brings back one of the most recognizable images in the history of political cartooning.

The cover, headlined “TRUMP WAS RIGHT (ABOUT VENEZUELA),” shows Trump dressed in safari-style clothing, standing across the Americas with a fuel pump in one hand.

The pose is not new.

Its origins go back 134 years to Edward Linley Sambourne’s famous 1892 cartoon “The Rhodes Colossus,” first published in Punch magazine. In Sambourne’s drawing, Trump’s place is occupied by Cecil Rhodes, one of the most controversial figures of British imperial expansion. Instead of the Americas, Rhodes stands over Africa.

And instead of a fuel pump, he holds a telegraph cable.

Sambourne’s full title was “The Rhodes Colossus — Striding from Cape Town to Cairo.” Published on December 10, 1892, the cartoon showed Rhodes at an impossible scale, with one foot planted in southern Africa and the other in the north.

Over time, the image became much more than a caricature of one man. It grew into one of the most familiar visual symbols of British imperial ambition in Africa and is still widely reproduced in books, academic studies and discussions of colonial history.

The Newsweek cover brings that visual formula almost intact into the present.

Rhodes becomes Trump. Africa becomes the Americas. The telegraph cable becomes oil.

That last change makes the Venezuela connection hard to miss.

Venezuela holds some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and energy has remained central to debates surrounding U.S. policy toward the country. The fuel pump in Trump’s hand turns that connection into the most direct visual element on the cover.

But the more interesting part of the story may be what happened after the image appeared.

Trump shared the cover on social media, while the White House’s official X account also posted it with the message “TRUST IN TRUMP.”

Seen without its historical reference, the image works easily as a piece of political triumphalism. Trump appears enormous, physically dominating two continents, while the headline declares that he “was right.”

For viewers familiar with Sambourne’s 1892 cartoon, however, the image carries a different history with it.

The original “Rhodes Colossus” was tied to Cecil Rhodes’s economic and political ambitions in Africa. Rhodes made his fortune through diamond mining and played a major role in British colonial expansion through the British South Africa Company. His political ideas were also closely associated with the imperial and racial hierarchies of his time.

That history does not automatically tell us what Newsweek intended.

Without a direct statement from the magazine or the artist, it would be too strong to claim that the cover was designed specifically to equate Trump with Cecil Rhodes or to function as a straightforward critique of imperialism.

But the visual reference itself is difficult to ignore.

The giant figure, the stance, the map beneath him and the object held in his hand all belong to a composition that has carried a very specific historical meaning for more than a century.

What has changed in 134 years is the vocabulary.

The telegraph cable has become a fuel pump. Africa has become the Americas. Cecil Rhodes has become Donald Trump.

The old cartooning device still works just as well:

Make power look bigger than life.

Sources

Cornell University Library — The Rhodes Colossus: Striding from Cape Town to Cairo
https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343183

FreeYork — Newsweek’s Trump Cover: A Misinterpreted Nod to Satirical History
https://freeyork.org/culture/newsweek-s-trump-cover-newsweeks-trump-cover-misin

Wonderwall — Donald Trump’s Post Resembles Cecil Rhodes Cartoon
https://www.wonderwall.com/politics/president-donald-trump-newsweek-cover-cecil-rhodes-comparison/

Wikimedia Commons — The Rhodes Colossus, Edward Linley Sambourne, 1892
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Punch_Rhodes_Colossus.png