Depending who you ask, after one year on the job President Trump is either going down in flames or he's totally on fire. So maybe Time's new cover will please both Trump haters and lovers?
Inside the Jan. 22 issue—on sale tomorrow—Time's POV on Trump, though, comes into sharp relief. The cover story, by Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs, is titled "The Unpresident: Why Donald Trump Will Never Change," and pivots off of Michael Wolff's best-seller "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House."
They write,
As for Trump, there is no sign that this book will change him at all, though he is clearly obsessed with its details and conclusions. (Perhaps to rebut the charges about his mental acuity, Trump took the extraordinary step on Jan. 9 of admitting cameras into bipartisan immigration negotiations for 55 minutes.) Axios reports that his official day now starts at 11 a.m., with the bulk of the morning carved out for "executive time"–watching TV, tweeting and talking to friends. He's spent one day out of three in his presidency so far at one of his ritzy properties; having ridiculed Obama for his time on the links, Trump played golf, by one count, 75 times in 2017. That means he golfed, on average, more than six times a month, which would count as a lot even if he were a nice Florida retiree. Which he isn't.
As for the cover concept, which includes a special animated version (above) created for social media, Sarah Begley writes in a post titled "The Story Behind Time's President Trump 'Year One' Cover" that,
In the year and a half since the artist Edel Rodriguez made his "Meltdown" cover for Time, his orange-and-yellow depiction of Donald Trump has become emblematic. In encore covers for Time (and for German magazine Der Spiegel), he has repeatedly reinvented the graphic concept to respond to the news cycle. ... "I got a message from [Time Creative Director] D.W. Pine that they wanted to do a cover referencing what's been going on with the Michael Wolff book, "Fire and Fury," and also the anniversary of the inauguration, looking back to the past year," Rodriguez says. The flames on the cover reference Wolff's book as well as the source of its title: Trump's statement that North Korea would be "met with fire and fury like the world has never seen" if it continued to threaten the United States.
