You’d think Donald Trump would be happy. Not only did he help broker a ceasefire to bring about an end to two years of hell in Gaza. He also – this is what really matters – got a flattering write up in Time Magazine. “The deal,” gushed correspondent Eric Cortellessa, “could become a signature achievement of Trump’s second term”. The cover image was even more adulatory: “HIS TRIUMPH” reads the caption, beneath a shot of the US President gazing into the distance thinking his great thoughts.
This, surely, is the moment presidents dream of – their place in history not merely assured but commemorated. Trump must be delighted.
He isn’t. “Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time,” he wrote on, inevitably, Truth Social. “They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!”
“I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles,” he went on, “but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?” Good question.
What they are doing, ironically, seems to be: trying to make Trump look good. Pictures taken from below may be a mistake on dating profiles and social media; in the iconography of politics, though, it’s a long-standing way to make leaders seem heroic, like they’re looking beyond today’s narrow partisanship to the horizon, where history lies. It even, as a bonus, makes them look tall.
Alas, it can also draw unflattering attention to a declining jawline or to thinning hair. Worse, from a presidential ego point of view, sunlight through white hair on a white background ends up looking suspiciously like “no hair”. Trump may not be as bald as the picture suggests. But he is, unavoidably, 79 years old.
Mirrors lie, cameras can be cruel, and who among us has never worried about our angles. (Pictures have repeatedly failed to capture my own youthful, chiselled features, and insist instead on showing a podgy man in early middle age whose look would be best described as “Beethoven is not taking the divorce well”.) Most of us may rage against such things in secret or, at worst, to those we imagine are most likely to lie. Most of us, though, don’t have to deal with those pictures becoming magazine covers or, come to that, with Trump’s lack of self control.
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Asking why the President has thrown a tantrum is like asking why he’s so insistent on breathing, but even so, this seems an extreme example. It’s possible that Time’s apparent belief this shot was flattering is a problem in itself. Demagogues have always sought to control their own image, which is what gave us heads on coins and statues of ageing Roman emperors looking suspiciously ripped. This shot is a reminder that, in the age of mass media, such control can never be absolute.
This, though, may be to give Trump too much credit. Perhaps the explanation is that, by presenting him as a wise old man, it has inevitably presented him as an old man. That so little of the discourse during Joe Biden’s presidency related to policies or achievements, and so much simply to his faculties – a fact Trump mercilessly played on – might have made his slightly younger successor all too aware of what can happen to a president who publicly ages.
But perhaps Biden need not come into it. Perhaps, like the slave whispering in the emperor’s ear, this cover is simply a reminder of Trump’s own inevitable mortality.
From Trump’s lifelong obsession with memorialising himself in concrete and glass, to his demands for a Nobel Peace Prize, to his wish to remake Gaza in his own image: all of it suggests an obsession with legacy, a desire to leave something of himself in the world. Ultimately, though, none of that will matter.
No matter what he builds – no matter how tight his stranglehold on America, or how inescapable he is today – in a relatively small number of years he won’t be here any more. Even in his moment of triumph, in the most flattering of coverage, he’s been confronted by an uncomfortable message: remember you are mortal.
Jonn Elledge is a writer and journalist
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