Donald Trump TIME Covers - Stories Behind Each One - Time

14/08/2021 Donald Trump TIME Covers: Stories Behind Each One | Time
The Stories Behind Donald Trump’s TIME Covers
BY D.W. PINE
JANUARY 19, 2021 5:12 PM EST
IDEAS
D.W. Pine is the Creative Director at TIME.
A t a dinner for the TIME 100 in 2019, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of
President Donald Trump, asked me a question: “What is your favorite
TIME cover of my father-in-law?”
I don’t normally like to pick a favorite cover. I would rather not single out one
from among the more than 700 TIME covers I’ve designed and produced over
the past 12 years. But I did answer Kushner’s question. More on that later.
Trump, whose presidency comes to end this week, has always had a fascination
with TIME. He first landed on the cover on Jan. 16, 1989, 28 years before his
inauguration, with the headline “This Man May Turn You Green With Envy – or
Just Turn You Off. Flaunting it is His Game, and Trump is his Name.”
https://time.com/5928282/donald-trump-time-covers/ 1/7
His continued interest was evident during his first full day as commander-in-
chief when Trump, standing in NEXT
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in the line of duty, told a gathering of national security officials, “I have been
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history of Time Magazine. If Tom Brady is on the cover it’s one time because
you won the Super Bowl or something, right? I’ve been on the cover 15 times
this year. I don’t think that’s a record that could ever be broken.” At the time,
Trump had been on 11 covers. He did not then, nor does he now, hold the
record of most TIME covers. More on that later too.
Since before his election, Trump regularly politicked to be named TIME’s

Person of the Year (he was recognized as such in 2016), using campaign rallies
and his now-locked Twitter feed to comment on TIME’s choices. And perhaps
most notably, fake TIME covers were designed to hang in his golf course
clubhouses, with cover lines exclaiming that “Trump is hitting it on all fronts
… even TV!” The existence of the bogus covers, first reported by the
Washington Post, prompted TIME to ask the TrumpOrganization to remove
them.
TIME has a long history of featuring presidents on the cover and Trump, whose
presidency defied precedents and fractured norms, has been no exception.
Eight of the top 10 people to appear most often on TIME’s cover are U.S.
presidents. Trump finishes his term with 35 TIME covers, the fourth most of
any president behind Richard Nixon’s 55 covers, Ronald Reagan with 46 and
Bill Clinton with 40. Rounding out the top 10 are Barack Obama with 31,
George W. Bush (30), Jimmy Carter (27), Jesus (22), and Hillary Clinton and
George H.W. Bush tied at 21.
We first introduced Candidate Trump to TIME’s readers in August 2015, when

photographer Martin Schoeller and TIME Editor-at-Large Paul Moakley brought
a live bald eagle to the Trump Tower in New York City for a portrait. The eagle
was particularly animated during the photo and video session, prompting
Trump to exclaim at one point, “I love TIME Magazine. What you will do for a
cover … this bird is seriously dangerous and beautiful.” A clip of the bird
nipping at the Republican candidate went viral.

During the 2016 campaign, we produced seven covers featuring Trump and
created an original visual language
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Edel Rodriguez. Rodriguez, who worked as TIME’s international art director in
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grabbed
worldwide recognition with the “Meltdown” cover (Aug. 22, 2016), a reflection
of his slumping campaign following the Republican National Convention. Two
months later, in response to the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood”
tape, Rodriguez followed with an updated image. “Total Meltdown” received
the 2017 Cover of the Year award from the American Society of Magazine
Editors.
“By condensing his look down to the basic elements, done through color, one
could focus more on the concept behind the image or what the president
symbolized, rather than what he looked like,” says Rodriguez, who illustrated
seven TIME covers featuring Trump. “I think a typical caricature, where the
artist makes fun of a person’s weight or other characteristics, can be easily
dismissed. I strive to make images that bypass all of that and hit closer to the
bone.”
Some covers call for more straight-forward treatment, putting a moment in its
historical context. Such was the case for Trump’s 2016 election night win and
subsequent inauguration. Other covers, capturing moments like impeachment,
call for a more critical lens, for which TIME worked with artists and illustrators
since its inception.
Rodriguez follows decades of creative work addressing the American

presidency. David Levine depicted Lydon Johnson as Shakespeare’s King Lear
(Jan. 5, 1968), an illustration that Levine said at the time was the “best
metaphor for a man beset with problems.” Mike Hinge created a foreboding
graphic portrait of Richard Nixon under the headline “The Push to Impeach”
(Nov. 5, 1973). Mort Drucker caricatured President Gerald Ford and House
Speaker Carl Albert as hapless doctors trying to revive a deathly ill economy
(Jan. 27, 1975). TIME presented a diminutive photo of Clinton underneath a
bold headline “The Incredible Shrinking President” (June 7, 1993). President
George Bush sported a lipstick kiss and a black eye on a Dec. 1, 2003 cover with
the words “Love Him, Hate Him.”
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Prominent Fact‑Checker Snopes Apologizes

for Plagiarism
Which leads me back to Kushner’s question.
My favorite TIME cover of Trump is “Nothing to See Here” from Feb. 27, 2017. I
believe the strongest TIME covers leave space for a variety of perspectives. As I
told Kushner, “if you’re an opponent of your father-in-law, you look at that
cover and see all the chaos this man has created. And if you’re a supporter, you
look at it and say even among the chaos in Washington, look at how resolute he
is. That is a great place for a TIME cover to be.” He agreed.
That image was created by longtime collaborator Tim O’Brien, who has painted
more TIME covers (33) in the past 30 years than any artist. It was the first of
what would become a series of four paintings from O’Brien depicting Trump in
a growing storm within the Oval Office.
“I don’t generally do cartoonish images, so faces are often neutral and the
situation is revealed through the ridiculous analogies,” says O’Brien, whose
cover series included “Stormy” (April 23, 2018), “In Deep” (Sept. 3, 2018) and
“The Plague Election” (Aug. 17, 2020).
“To me, that is enough, and puts a cover image in a zone where the viewer can
apply their thoughts to the matter.” The
NEXT UP:
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scandal involving Stormy Daniels, was named Adweek’s Cover the Year for
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“The past four years were emotionally draining for most people. While I
stressed over most of Trump’s actions in office, I was not as bothered with him
as I was with his enablers,” says O’Brien, who ended up painting eight TIME
covers featuring the president. “I knew Trump, being a New Yorker. It was all
those who turned a blind eye that shook my faith in the guardrails. There is a
cover idea in there, somewhere.”
The variety of our visual approaches on the cover underscores the variety of
what TIME covers. In the past three years, we presented the president as a
frenetic Twitter user crumbling the Washington monument (March 20, 2017), a
punching bag (Oct. 9, 2017), a graphic wrecking ball (Nov. 6, 2017), an angry
character with his hair on fire (Jan. 22, 2018), a cross between himself and
Vladimir Putin (July 30, 2018), a king looking into a mirror (June 18, 2018), a
slingshot-holding fighter dueling with Nancy Pelosi (Jan. 21, 2019), a happy
president whistling under an umbrella in the rain (April 8, 2019) and a man
who has painted himself into a corner (Oct. 7, 2019).
We’ve also photographed Trump for multiple covers, including a White House
tour (one day before the firing of James Comey) for our May 22, 2017 cover, and
an Oval Office conversation in the summer of 2019 on Trump’s effort to keep
the White House. That cover, photographed by Pari Dukovic for TIME, had
Trump sitting on the resolute desk in the Oval Office with the quote, “My
Whole Life is a Bet.”
The Trump covers show how design of the TIME cover has adapted to the
changing social media landscape, where millions view the cover today.
“I was surprised at how successfully the images were used and how well they
translated on a variety of media, from television, to YouTube, Instagram and
Twitter,” said Rodriguez. “This made me realize how much of a cultural object a
magazine cover can be at this time. You can’t hold up a digital image, a
magazine has weight, scale, it marks history.”
Our Trump covers have not been without debate. An image we created of
Trump staring down at a youngNEXT
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cover (July 2, 2018) sparked controversy. The President also continues to tweet
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As the events of last year unfolded, aside from a couple of covers questioning
his response to the growing pandemic, Trump’s image on the cover took a
backseat to frontline workers, racial injustice protests and the rising Covid
numbers. And even though his time left as president can now be counted in
hours, it’s certainly possible that we haven’t seen the last of him on the cover
of TIME.
“TIME covers remain, through all the changes in media prominence and ways
with which people get their news, a powerful mark of where the national
conversation is,” adds O’Brien. “The sharing of a cover is a way for people to
offer their take on where we are, and in return, perhaps offers a bit of catharsis
in the act.”
Before Kushner and I ended our brief conversation that night, I asked him a
question: “Which cover would you say is your father-in-law’s favorite?” He
thought for a second, and said “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him.”
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CONTACT US AT LETTERS@TIME.COM.
TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on

events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions.
Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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14/08/2021 Donald Trump TIME Covers: Stories Behind Each One | Time

The Stories Behind Donald Trump’s TIME Covers

Since before his election, Trump regularly politicked to be named TIME’s

We first introduced Candidate Trump to TIME’s readers in August 2015, when

Rodriguez follows decades of creative work addressing the American

Most Recent NEXT UP:

Prominent Fact‑Checker Snopes Apologizes

Which leads me back to Kushner’s question.

from Oct. 22, 2018.

Sign up for Inside TIME.

Enter your email address

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on

SHARE THIS STORY

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