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It is a positive article in a periodical that Trump has consistently praised – with one exception. The cover picture, he stated, ""might be the most terrible in history".

Time's tribute to Trump's role in brokering a truce for Gaza, featured on its November 10 cover, was accompanied by a photograph of Trump taken from below while the sun shining from the back.

The effect, he says, is "super bad".

"Time wrote a quite favorable story about me, but the image may be the Worst of All Time", Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had an object hovering on top of my head that resembled a hovering tiara, but an extremely small one. Quite bizarre! I consistently avoided taking pictures from below viewpoints, but this is a super bad picture, and merits public condemnation. Why did they do this, and why?”

The president has expressed no secret of his desire to feature on Time’s cover and did so multiple times in the past year. The preoccupation has extended to Trump’s golf clubs – in 2017, the editors demanded to remove mocked up covers on display at some of his properties.

The latest edition’s photo was taken by Graeme Sloane for a news agency at the White House on 5 October.

Its angle did no favours for his chin and neck area – a chance that the governor of California Newsom seized, with the governor's office tweeting a version with the criticized section obscured.

{The Israeli captives held in Gaza have been liberated under the first phase of the president's diplomatic initiative, in exchange for a release of Palestinian detainees. This agreement may become a defining accomplishment of Trump's second term, and it might signify a pivotal moment for that part of the world.

Meanwhile, a defense of Trump's image has been offered by an unexpected source: the director of information at Moscow's diplomatic office intervened to criticise the "damaging" image choice.

"It’s astonishing: a photo says more about those who selected it than about the person in it. Only sick people, people filled with spite and hatred –perhaps even perverts – could have picked this picture", the official posted on her social channel.

In light of the positive pictures of President Biden that the same publication used on the cover, notwithstanding his health issues, the story is simply self-incriminating for the publication", she noted.

The explanation for Trump’s questions – what were Time’s editors doing, and why? – might involve creatively capturing a sense of power according to an imaging expert, Guardian Australia’s picture editor.

The photograph technically is well-executed," she explains. "They chose this shot because they wanted the president to look heroic. Gazing upward gives a sense of their importance and his expression actually looks contemplative and almost somewhat divine. It's rare you see photos of Trump in such a peaceful state – the photo appears gentle."

His hair appears to “disappear” because the sunlight behind him has overexposed that part of the image, producing a glowing aura, she explains. Even though the feature's heading complements the president's look in the image, "you can’t always please the person photographed."

Nobody enjoys being shot from underneath, and while all of the conceptual elements of the image are quite powerful, the visual appeal are not flattering."

The Guardian reached out to the magazine for comment.