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It is a glowing feature in a periodical that Trump has frequently admired – except for one issue. The front-page image, Trump declared, "may be the Worst of All Time".

Time magazine's tribute to Donald Trump's part in brokering a Gaza ceasefire, headlining its early November edition, was accompanied by a photograph of the president taken from below while the sun positioned behind him.

The result, Trump claims, is ""extremely poor".

"The publication wrote a fairly positive story about me, but the image may be the lowest quality in history", the president posted on Truth Social.

“My hair was ‘disappeared’, and then there was a shape over my head that seemed like a hovering crown, but extremely small. Truly strange! I have always hated being photographed from below, but this is a super bad image, and it deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?”

Trump has made obvious his ambition to appear on Time’s cover and accomplished it four times last year. The preoccupation has extended to the president's resorts – in 2017, the publication requested to remove fake issues on display at several of his venues.

The most recent cover image was captured by a photographer for Bloomberg at the presidential residence on 5 October.

Its angle highlighted negatively the president's jawline and throat – a chance that California governor Newsom took advantage of, with his communications team tweeting a version with the offending area obscured.

{The Israeli captives detained in Gaza have been released under the initial stage of Donald Trump's peace plan, alongside a release of Palestinian detainees. The arrangement might turn into a major success of the president's renewed tenure, and it might signify a key shift for the Middle East.

Meanwhile, a defence of Trump's image has emerged from a surprising origin: the director of information at Russia’s ministry of foreign affairs came forward to denounce the "self-incriminating" image choice.

"It’s astonishing: a image reveals far more about those who picked it than about the person in it. Only sick people, people driven by hatred and animosity –possibly even deviants – could have chosen such a photo", Maria Zakharova shared on the messaging platform.

In light of the positive pictures of President Biden that the periodical displayed on the cover, notwithstanding his health issues, the situation is self-revealing for the magazine", she said.

The explanation for his queries – what were Time’s editors doing, and why? – might involve innovatively depicting a feeling of authority according to a picture editor, Guardian Australia’s picture editor.

The photograph technically technically is good," she explains. "They picked this image because they wanted the president to look commanding. Looking up at a person evokes a feeling of their grandeur and Trump’s face actually looks contemplative and almost slightly angelic. It’s not often you see photos of Trump in such a serene moment – the photo appears gentle."

Trump’s hair looks erased because the light from behind has bleached that section of the image, producing a glowing aura, she says. Although the feature's heading marries well with the president's look in the image, "it's impossible to satisfy the person photographed."

Nobody enjoys being photographed from below, and even if all of the conceptual elements of the image are quite powerful, the visual appeal are not complimentary."

The Guardian contacted Time magazine for a statement.