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It is a favorable article in a magazine that Trump has consistently praised – but for one catch. The front-page image, he stated, ""could be the worst ever".

Time magazine's paean to Donald Trump's part in brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, leading its 10 November issue, was accompanied by a photograph of Trump captured from underneath while the sun positioned behind him.

The result, Trump claims, is ""terrible".

"The publication wrote a relatively good story about me, but the image may be the most awful ever", Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“They eliminated my hair, and then had an object hovering on top of my head that looked like a suspended coronet, but an extremely small one. Quite bizarre! I consistently avoided taking pictures from low perspectives, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?”

Trump has made no secret of his desire to be pictured on the cover of Time and achieved this four times last year. The obsession has made it as far as his golf courses – previously, the magazine asked him to remove fabricated front pages shown in several of his venues.

The most recent cover image was captured by a photographer for a news agency at the presidential residence on 5 October.

Its angle did no favours for the president's jawline and throat – an opening that the governor of California Gavin Newsom seized, with his communications team sharing an altered image with the offending area pixelated.

{The hostages from Israel in Gaza have been liberated under the initial stage of the president's diplomatic initiative, together with a release of Palestinian detainees. This agreement might turn into a major success of his next term, and it might signify a key shift for the Middle East.

Simultaneously, a defense of his portrayal has been offered by an unexpected source: the director of information at Moscow's diplomatic office intervened to denounce the "revealing" image choice.

"It’s astonishing: a image reveals far more about those who selected it than about the person in it. Only disturbed individuals, people filled with spite and hatred –possibly even deviants – could have picked this picture", she wrote on her social channel.

Considering the favorable images of President Biden that the periodical displayed on the cover, despite his physical infirmity, the story is simply self-incriminating for the magazine", she noted.

The response to the president's inquiries – what did the editors intend, and why? – may be something to do with creatively capturing a sense of power according to an imaging expert, Guardian Australia’s picture editor.

"The actual photo itself is professionally taken," she notes. "They picked this image because they wanted trump to look impressive. Looking up at a person creates an impression of their majesty and the president's visage actually looks reflective and almost somewhat divine. It's uncommon you see photos of Trump in such a serene moment – the image has a softness to it."

His hair looks erased because the light from behind has bleached that section of the image, generating a radiant circle, she explains. Even though the feature's heading marries well with Trump’s expression in the image, "one cannot constantly gratify the individual in question."

Nobody enjoys being captured from low angles, and although all of the artistic aspects of the image are highly effective, the aesthetics are unflattering."

The publication contacted the periodical for comment.