Back in 2017, Donald Trump hung a fake Time magazine cover of himself in several of his golf clubs. It looked real enough — headline and all — until someone noticed the date was off and the barcode didn’t exist. The magazine had never printed it.
Eight years later, Time finally gave him a real cover. He’s still not happy.
Returning from Sharm El Sheikh on Tuesday, President Trump was furious over the magazine’s latest issue, which featured him under the headline “His Triumph.” The cover marked what Time called his historic Gaza peace deal — a ceasefire that freed the remaining Israeli hostages and ended months of conflict.
The article praised Trump’s “painstaking efforts” with envoy Steve Witkoff and adviser Jared Kushner to “quiet one of the world’s most destabilizing conflicts.” It even described the agreement as a potential “signature achievement” of his second term.
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But Trump wasn’t reading the article. He was staring at the picture.
“I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture,” Trump complained on Truth Social at 1:30 a.m. while flying back to Washington. “They ‘disappeared’ my hair and had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one.”
He called it “the Worst of All Time.”
Trump’s frustration may have been justified, at least visually. The 79-year-old appeared to be looking up into a beam of light — a dramatic pose meant to convey triumph — but the angle left him looking noticeably different from his usual appearance.
According to Daily Mail, a Time staffer admitted off the record that the effect “was on purpose” and “we laughed about it.” Another insider defended the shot, saying, “We wanted a picture that didn’t look like every other photo out there. We’re not Vogue.”
Trump didn’t see the humor. The post sparked another round of his long-running feud with Time, which has featured him on dozens of covers since 2015 — sometimes glowing, sometimes brutal.
It’s not the first time he’s raged about his image. In March, he blasted a distorted painting of himself hanging in the Colorado State Capitol, calling it “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” The portrait was later taken down.
Even his White House photos have gone through multiple edits. His 2025 inauguration portrait was reissued with darker lighting and a sharper look — reportedly at his request.
Despite the photo drama, Time’s article remains one of the most flattering pieces ever written about Trump’s foreign policy. On social media, the outlet even called the Gaza deal his “signature achievement,” writing, “The living Israeli hostages held in Gaza have been freed under the first phase of Donald Trump’s peace plan, alongside a Palestinian prisoner release.”
Featured image via X screengrab
