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This is a favorable feature in a publication that the president has consistently praised – except for one issue. The front-page image, the president decreed, ""could be the worst ever".

Time magazine's paean to Donald Trump's part in facilitating a Gaza ceasefire, leading its 10 November issue, was presented alongside a photograph of Trump shot from a low angle while the sun shining from the back.

The effect, he says, is ""extremely poor".

"Time Magazine wrote a quite favorable story about me, but the picture may be the lowest quality in history", the president posted on his social media platform.

“My hair was ‘disappeared’, and then there was something floating my head that appeared as a suspended diadem, but very tiny. Very odd! I have never liked being photographed from below, but this is a extremely poor image, and it should be denounced. What is their goal, and why?”

Donald Trump has shown clear his wish to feature on Time’s cover and achieved this multiple times in the past year. The preoccupation has made it as far as his golf courses – previously, the editors demanded to remove mocked up covers shown in several of his venues.

The latest edition’s photo was shot by Graeme Sloane for a news agency at the presidential residence on the fifth of October.

The shot's viewpoint did no favours for the president's jawline and throat – a chance that the governor of California Gavin Newsom did not miss, with the governor's office sharing an altered image with the offending area obscured.

{The hostages from Israel in Gaza have been liberated under the initial stage of the president's diplomatic initiative, in exchange for a freeing of Palestinian inmates. This agreement could be a defining accomplishment of Trump's second term, and it may represent a key shift for the region.

Simultaneously, a defence of the president’s appearance has been offered by a surprising origin: the communications chief at the Russian foreign ministry stepped in to criticise the "self-incriminating" photo selection.

"It’s astonishing: a photo reveals far more about those who chose it than about the individual pictured. Only sick people, people obsessed with malice and resentment –maybe even degenerates – could have chosen such a photo", Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram.

"And given the complimentary photos of Biden that the same publication featured on the front, notwithstanding his health issues, the story is simply self-incriminating for Time", she added.

The response to the president's inquiries – what were Time’s editors doing, and why? – might involve innovatively depicting a sense of power stated by a picture editor, a media professional.

The photograph technically technically is good," she explains. "They chose this shot because they wanted trump to look commanding. Staring up at someone gives a sense of their grandeur and the president's visage actually looks thoughtful and almost somewhat divine. It’s not often you see images of the president in such a calm instance – the photo appears gentle."

The president's hair appears to “disappear” because the sunlight behind him has washed out that area of the image, producing a glowing aura, she adds. Even though the feature's heading marries well with the president's look in the image, "you can’t always please the subject matter."

"No one likes being captured from low angles, and even if all of the artistic aspects of the image are quite powerful, the aesthetics are not flattering."

The publication approached Time magazine for comment.