Anyone who walks past a newsstand knows that Time magazine hates Donald Trump. Don’t doubt us. You’d lose. In 2016, they pictured his orange face melting on the cover, and then months later, that cover face melted into an orange puddle. They considered it unthinkable that he would win. Then once he won, two different covers imagined an endangered Trump in the middle of a raging storm.
In the latest issue, he looks into a mirror and sees himself as a king with a crown. The title is “KING ME. Visions of Absolute Power.”
It all depends on which political party you like. Time can joyously assign royal qualities to some presidents. When Barack Obama won the White House, he was a prince, not unlike Jesus Christ: "Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope."
Passages like that make one thing clear. Anyone who thinks Time is a “news magazine” hasn’t opened one since disco roller-skating was fashionable.
Inside this latest edition, Time warns “THE WAR ON MUELLER: Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit the Russia investigation may be working. It may also be damaging American democracy.” Compare that to this. On February 9, 1998, just days after the Lewinsky scandal broke, Time’s cover said: “STARR AT WAR: As the Clintons strike back, the prosecutor struggles to build his case.”
The Clintons’ bashing of the independent prosecutor as the fanged head of a ridiculous “vast right-wing conspiracy” was not described by the Time crowd as damaging to our democracy. Instead, they proclaimed “Starr’s methods are not always easy to stomach. Going after the President’s sex life, wiring Linda Tripp to secretly tape Lewinsky, trying to persuade Lewinsky to tape Clinton – are those the actions of a conscientious prosecutor or a political hit man?”
But in Robert Mueller, Time has found a white knight to bring down the evil King Trump. A year ago, they called Mueller “The Lie Detector” on their cover and proclaimed “It goes back to the Greeks, who understood that the peril of kings was hubris, and that hubris was an invitation to the avenging goddess called Nemesis. In Robert Mueller, Trump may have found his.”
In their latest edition, Time claims Robert Mueller is a “lifelong Republican” and then just lists Trump attacks on his team, “not all of which are accurate.” So when Trump charged the Mueller team has “13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters and Zero Republicans?” Time would say that’s not true because Mueller is a Republican. Time left out that this “Republican” signed up 13 Democrat lawyers, six of whom donated to Hillary Clinton. One even represented the Clintons in court.
Time briefly admits “This playbook” against prosecutors “has been run before by Clinton,” but quickly pivots to how Trump’s strategy involved “asserting increasingly broad claims of presidential impunity,” the kind of “unchecked power Americans have bridled against from the moment they broke with the British monarchy in the 18th century.” Trump claimed the power to pardon himself.
But Trump-as-king is apparently too gentle a metaphor. Time found an anonymous Republican congressman to compare the Trump White House to.... al-Qaeda: “This is not a coordinated caliphate. This is al-Qaeda, where everyone is their own call, lobbing Molotov cocktails, firing at will.”
So Obama blurs with Jesus, Robert Mueller brings to mind a Greek goddess, and Team Trump are like mass-murdering terrorists. This is why you spit when these ink-stained partisans call themselves the “mainstream media.”
