Magazines take on Donald Trump through covers

He is “stupid” and “an idiot,” so said Donald Trump’s senior most aides during their dealings with their boss, a new book by veteran political journalist Bob Woodward says. The disgust against Trump has always been there, but now it seems that it is spilling over from public into the Oval Office, the world’s most powerful office that Trump has whimsically managed since Jan 20 last year, the day he assumed presidency.

TIME Magazine, the world’s most read weekly publication, also came out with a cover that aptly summed the public mood (not talking about Trump’s White Nationalist supporter base) through its front cover. A drowning Trump struggling in an inundated Oval Office features on the front cover of TIME’s latest edition.

The trigger for the explosive illustration (see above) is the damning testimony of Trump’s long-time personal attorney Michael Cohen on August 21 in a New York court, where he admitted that he was asked by Trump to suppress accounts of two of president’s extramarital affairs during the presidential campaign in 2016.

The investigation into Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia by ex-Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) chief Rob Mueller, on the other hand, seems to be approaching an outcome which could bedevil his prospects for a second-term.

On the same fateful day that Cohen confessed against his (former) boss, a previous head of Trump’s presidential campaign, Paul Manafort, was convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud. Not only at home, the maverick New Yorker’s pot of foreign policy blunders is also filling up fast.

The new book by Woodward, instrumental in the downfall of Richard Nixon during the ‘Watergate’, also mentions how Trump all but ordered the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (one could imagine the repercussions from Russia and Iran).

For audiences in India, Trump is known to mimic Prime Minister Narendra Modi often during discussions with his top aides. The temperamental former businessman is also said to confuse country names and mix-up time zones.

All the fallacies of the President, however, have failed to shake the confidence of his support base. Second year on, Trump averages 87 per cent approval rating among Republicans, as per Gallup.