Its date might be a clue: March 1, 2009, was the season debut of Trump’s show “The Celebrity Apprentice.” But a transcript of that show offers no answers. It is not clear who created this fake Time cover - or why. But, still, his staff added an extra trophy that was phony. The clubs are monuments to Trump’s success - they bear his name and are filled with his images. In this case, Trump’s golf clubs might seem like a place where he wouldn’t need to stretch the truth. Trump has made claims about himself - about his charitable giving, his business success, even the size of the crowd at his inauguration - that are not supported by the facts. The cover seems to fit a broader pattern for Trump, who has often boasted of his appearances on Time’s cover and adorned his Trump Tower office with images of himself from magazines and newspapers. “We couldn’t comment on the decor at Trump Golf clubs one way or another,” Sanders wrote in an email. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to say whether Trump had known the cover wasn’t real. The Trump Organization did not respond to questions this week about who made the cover and why it was displayed at Trump clubs. So how did Trump - who spent an entire campaign and much of his presidency accusing the mainstream media of producing “fake news” - wind up decorating his properties with a literalpiece of phony journalism? “I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover,” Kerri Chyka, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., wrote in an email to The Washington Post. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side - on a real Time cover, they would go across the top.Īnd it has two exclamation points. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. In fact,the cover on display at Trump’s clubs,observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.
There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time Magazine.