It is, in my experience, often the photo that does it. You can be nice or mean, bland or snide, accurate or wildly off-base. But none of what you write as a journalist matters much in comparison with the photo that runs alongside it. That’s the main determinant of how bitterly a subject will complain about a piece, or whether they will tip from mildly annoyed to actively raging. In this regard, Donald Trump, who went after Time magazine this week for using a photo of him on the cover he has called “super bad” and “the Worst of All Time”, has acted in a way that, unusually for the president, is in line with how other people act.
Even more unusually, he’s not wrong. The Time cover, shot from below to give readers an unrestricted view up Trump’s nose, is extremely unflattering. His turkey wattle neck looks like a ski run after the snow has melted. His eye is reptilian. His hair is the flyaway gauze of a newborn. Or, as Trump put it in the Truth Social rant he published in the early hours of Tuesday morning: “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.” (He can’t stay normal for long – the “crown” is just flare from the sun behind his head.) In these circumstances, it doesn’t matter to Trump that the headline is fawning (“His Triumph”), or the piece positive, praising the ceasefire in Gaza as “the deal [that] could become a signature achievement”. He only has eyes for the photo.
