WASHINGTON • Three respected magazines have criticised US President Donald Trump's defence of white supremacists in their latest issues.

The New Yorker shows him in a boat blowing wind into a sail shaped like the hood of white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan (KKK), while The Economist shows him blowing into a KKK megaphone. Time did not have him on the cover, but showed a person draped in an American flag giving the Nazi salute.

In an editorial, The Economist said Mr Trump is "politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for office". While the editorial said Mr Trump was not himself a white supremacist, it accused him of bungling "the simplest of political tests: Finding a way to condemn Nazis".

Mr Trump sparked an outcry after blaming both white supremacist and "alt-left" groups for the violence that led to the death of a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia, last Saturday.

An article in The New Yorker said "even assuming that Trump will survive this latest horror show, as he has survived many previous ones, his presidency will be further diminished and tarnished".

Time noted in an article that Mr Trump had inspired millions desperate for a new voice. But after Charlottesville, Americans "saw his reluctance to turn away from people who admire him, claim him, even if they do so in the name of beliefs that Americans have died fighting to defeat".