US President Donald Trump stands in a sea of the coronavirus — outside the White House — on Time’s new cover.
“The rising water as a metaphor for chaos in the Trump White House could only end two ways,” artist Tim O’Brien explained of his picture that will grace the cover of the magazine’s August 17 issue.
Trump “survives only to be in the surging waves surrounded by coronavirus, each one a little bomb,” O’Brien added.
Check out the cover here:
The cover story — headlined “The Plague Election” — tells how the pandemic has changed the 2020 campaign.
It also imagines how Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s respective campaigns may have played out without the public health crisis.
O’Brien’s depictions of Trump ― whose administration’s response to the pandemic has been fiercely criticized ― have appeared on the publication’s cover on multiple previous occasions.
In 2017, the “chaos” inside the White House was laid bare via this image:
The text was tweaked for the April 2018 edition as Trump faced accusations of using campaign cash to buy porn star Stormy Daniels’ silence over their alleged affair.
Trump was “In Deep” with this cover by O’Brien in September 2018:
And in April 2019, O’Brien showed Trump in a more joyous mood following the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation: