Time magazine denies doing it on purpose, yet the sign is there. The mark – and this one is much more visible than the 666 that I have been told by a maverick Vatican priest is tattooed on Donald Trump’s left buttock.
There was no unpredictability about Time’s choice for its person of the year. Just as in 1214 it had to be Genghis Khan and in 1462 Time could not fail to recognize Vlad the Impaler’s impact – the screaming bodies he left on stakes across Transylvania were a tribute to his determination and foreign policy strength – this year it had no choice but to put the president-elect of the United States on its cover.
He looks the part. Photographed inside Trump Tower by Nadav Kander, the most powerful man in the world radiates the grandeur of destiny. Turning to look at us from his expensive and ornate, indeed monarchical, chair, he wants it to be seen that he means business. He is not smiling. He is not joking. He is not even tweeting.
Time calls him “President of the Divided States of America,” and Kander’s photograph casts one side of Trump’s face in shadow. Is that facial division into light and dark meant as an allegory of the “divided” nation to which Time’s cover refers? Or is it a suggestion of his apparent dark side, the unreasonable id that seemed to expose itself in his readiness to resort to extreme language, images and threats during his mad and triumphant campaign?
Portraying Trump as a man flawed and divided in the manner of the Batman character Two-Face might seem quite gothic enough on a magazine cover that is in theory celebrating the most important, influential, impactful human being of the year. Yet many people have spotted something still more sinister. Looking at the way the two pointed arches of the M in TIME seem to rise out Trump’s golden slick of power-hair, they have suggested on Twitter that the magazine deliberately made the incoming president look like the devil.
The claim that Time gave Trump horns has spread so fast online that the magazine has actually felt the need to deny what surely started as facetious speculation. It insists that it had no such intention and this is simply what happens when you have a big M at the top of the page: “Any resemblance to ... devil horns is entirely coincidental.”
Tell that to Father Jerzy Bolochs, the former exorcist and consultant to paranormal thrillers who I interviewed this morning in an abandoned cemetery outside Pisa. In his opinion this is no “coincidence”. That would be like saying the rain of sheep that fell on Paris on the eve of the Black Death was a coincidence.
Of course the editors of Time did not intentionally give Trump devil horns. God did. This is, fears Bolochs, one final sign before the Antichrist is inaugurated as president in the New Year. If you’ve seen the Omen series, you will know how far the devil is prepared to go to get his offspring into high political office. Yet in Omen III Damien only became an ambassador. That’s more the level of Britain’s Nigel Farage than his boss Donald Trump.
Wait, this is all wrong. I was trying to see the funny side. Now I am shuddering. The corny notion that a magazine set out to show Donald Trump as the devil, as if the editors of Time were likely to practice radical photomontage in the style of the German anti-Hitler artist John Heartfield, has wings – demonic bat wings, naturally – because that expresses the extremity of fear and unreality many of us feel about this man’s rise to power.
The Twitter fantasy that Time gave Trump satanic cranial outgrowths works because his election really does feel like something out of a horror film. This whole election has created an absurd premise that takes us into the realm of apocalyptic fantasy.
No wonder some people who warned against him are now enthusing about the new regime, from Mitt Romney to historian Niall Ferguson. This is not just cynical flattery of power or even a regrouping of the right. It is in part an attempt to deny how bad things may soon get. It is human nature after all to be as optimistic as we can. The nightmare scenario of a Trump who really is as unpredictable and violently impulsive as he often appeared to be during his campaign is so frightening it makes you want to curl up and hide. Far better to hope that he is just another politician after all, or that he’s a new Reagan.
Since Trump has backtracked on some of his threats since November 8, we now wait to see which of his two faces is the real one. It is a shame the joke of Trump’s devil horns has obscured the real strength of Kander’s portrait.
What Kander captures is the pungency of the new president’s character, the open way he displays wealth and power. That larger than life persona may – his defenders hope – make America thrive. Yet the shadow swamping the far side of his face hints at the uncertainty and fear of having this mercurial demagogue messing with the planet for the next four years. Oh, he has the marks of the apocalypse alright. It did not take Time to put them there.