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It is a favorable article in a magazine that Trump has consistently praised – except for one issue. The front-page image, he stated, ""might be the most terrible in history".

Time magazine's tribute to the president's involvement in facilitating a truce for Gaza, featured on its November 10 cover, was accompanied by a photo of the president shot from a low angle and with the sun shining from the back.

The effect, Trump claims, is "super bad".

"The publication wrote a quite favorable story about me, but the picture may be the most awful ever", Trump wrote on his social media platform.

“My hair was erased, and then there was a shape over my head that looked like a hovering crown, but quite miniature. Really weird! I have consistently disliked being photographed from below, but this is a awful image, and it should be denounced. What are they doing, and why?”

The president has expressed clear his wish to be pictured on Time’s cover and did so on four occasions in the previous year. The preoccupation has reached Trump’s golf clubs – previously, the editors demanded to remove fabricated front pages on display at a few of his establishments.

The most recent cover image was shot by a photographer for Bloomberg at the presidential residence on 5 October.

The perspective did no favours for Trump’s chin and neck – an opening that California governor Newsom seized, with his communications team tweeting a version with the criticized section blurred.

{The living Israeli hostages detained in Gaza have been liberated under the opening part of Trump's ceasefire agreement, in exchange for a Palestinian prisoner release. The arrangement might turn into a signature achievement of the president's renewed tenure, and it may represent a strategic turning point for the Middle East.

At the same time, a support for the president’s appearance has emerged from an unexpected source: the spokesperson at Moscow's diplomatic office intervened to denounce the "self-incriminating" image choice.

"It’s astonishing: a photograph reveals far more about those who selected it than about the subject. Just unwell persons, people driven by hatred and animosity –maybe even degenerates – could have chosen such a photo", she wrote on the messaging platform.

In light of the positive pictures of Biden that the same publication displayed on the cover, despite his physical infirmity, the story is simply self-incriminating for the magazine", she said.

The answer to Trump’s questions – what were Time’s editors doing, and why? – could be related to innovatively depicting a sense of power says a picture editor, Guardian Australia’s picture editor.

The image itself technically is good," she says. "They picked this image because they wanted the president to look impressive. Staring up at someone evokes a feeling of their importance and Trump’s face actually looks contemplative and almost a bit ethereal. It's rare you see pictures of him in such a serene moment – the image has a softness to it."

His hair looks erased because the rear illumination has washed out that area of the image, generating a radiant circle, she adds. Even though the article's title pairs nicely with the president's look in the image, "it's impossible to satisfy the person photographed."

Nobody enjoys being photographed from below, and although all of the conceptual elements of the image are very strong, the visual appeal are not flattering."

The publication approached the magazine for comment.