TIME put Trump on its cover for a record 56th time on October 1, with a 75-minute Oval Office interview headlined “What Trump Has Built”. Other outlets read the same hour and chose very different words. The cover puts the man small at the bottom of the frame, arms open, standing on the presidential seal set into a helipad he built. Storm clouds sit over the White House; a construction site pushes in at the right edge. The pose can be read as a host’s welcome or as a figure dwarfed by the office. The headline picks one reading: “What Trump Has Built”. Admirers see a builder. Critics see the clouds. Both buy the issue. Then the magazine turns the camera on itself. Sam Jacobs, who runs TIME, counts 56 covers, a record that passes Nixon, and calls Trump a man who “may be the most consequential leader of this century so far”. The same piece notes he told TIME he liked 17 of the earlier 55, and that a week before, he tried to bar some outlets from covering him. The record belongs to the subject and to the magazine at once. Three outlets took the same answer about three justices and wrote three verbs. Breitbart: a regret, reported. HuffPost: a whine, judged. Esquire left the justices out and wrote about the man’s mind. Axios called the interview “combative”. The words underneath did not change. Each headline hands its own readers a ready feeling: sympathy, contempt or alarm.
