Trump Is (Half) Right About His Hideous Time Magazine Cover

Despite his decades-long obsession with seeing his face on magazines, and Time specifically, Donald Trump is not a good judge of what makes a good cover. None of the turn-of-the-millennium magazines named after Trump won any awards for their artistic direction (or anything else). And during the 2024 election, Trump repeatedly complained about Time’s perfectly fine Kamala Harris cover, alleging that it wasn’t based on an actual photo of his opponent (it was) and that the VP looked like his wife, Melania (she didn’t).

So if Trump’s Truth Social post about the new Time cover was one of the first things you saw online this morning, you’d be wise to assume that he was exaggerating wildly when he complained, “Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time.”

But in a rare turn of events, Trump’s social-media tirade was mostly correct. Here’s the cover of the November 10 issue, which the publication unveiled over the long weekend:

To be sure, this isn’t really the worst Trump photo of all time. Photographers have captured plenty of unflattering Trump images over the years, and this isn’t as bad as that old shot of Trump playing tennis in see-through shorts.

Trump’s suggestion that Time editors “‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one,” is also incorrect. Nature did all that. Aside from some apparent color correction, the cover image looks exactly the same as the original version accessible to anyone who has Getty Images:

By alleging that the photo was altered and asking “What are they doing, and why?” Trump is clearly suggesting that the editors at Time were intentionally trying to make him look bad. But there isn’t much evidence to support that. Trump looked great on the cover of Time’s 2024 “Person of the Year” issue, and the accompanying interview was pretty nonconfrontational. As the president noted, the new cover story on the Israel-Hamas deal is “relatively good” for him. And the all-caps cover lines “His Triumph” and “The Leader Israel Needed” sound like they could have been written for one of the fake Trump Time covers that he has hanging in his clubs.

The likeliest explanation is that the folks at Time scanned through Getty for a recent picture that made Trump look heroic, and they thought this unusual image of him as a towering figure with halo-ish lighting around his head fit the bill. But as Trump pointed out, “taking pictures from underneath angles” is usually a bad move — particularly when the subject is a 79-year-old man.

So yes, it’s a “super bad picture.” Does it “deserve to be called out” by the president of the United States? There are definitely better uses of his time, but I guess it beats sharing AI-generated videos about imaginary “Medbed” technology.