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It is a favorable feature in a publication that Donald Trump has consistently praised – with one exception. The magazine's cover photo, he stated, ""could be the worst ever".

Time's praise to the president's involvement in brokering a Gaza ceasefire, featured on its November 10 cover, was accompanied by a image of the president taken from below and with the sun behind his head.

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

"Time wrote a relatively good story about me, but the image may be the most awful ever", Trump wrote on his social media platform.

“They removed my hair, and then had a shape drifting on top of my head that resembled a hovering tiara, but an very tiny one. Truly strange! I consistently avoided taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and should be criticized. Why did they do this, and why?”

The president has expressed no secret of his desire to be pictured on the cover of Time and achieved this multiple times in the past year. The preoccupation has reached Trump’s golf clubs – in 2017, the magazine asked him to remove fake issues exhibited in some of his properties.

The latest edition’s photo was shot by a photographer for a news agency at the White House on 5 October.

The shot's viewpoint did no favours for Trump’s chin and neck – an opening that California governor Gavin Newsom seized, with his communications team tweeting a version with the problematic part obscured.

{The hostages from Israel in Gaza have been liberated under the opening part of Trump's ceasefire agreement, together with a release of Palestinian detainees. The deal could be a major success of the president's renewed tenure, and it could mark a strategic turning point for the Middle East.

At the same time, a support for Trump's image has been offered by unusual quarters: the director of information at the Russian foreign ministry stepped in to criticise the "damaging" image choice.

It's amazing: a image exposes those who picked it than about the subject. Only sick people, people filled with spite and hatred –maybe even degenerates – could have selected such an image", she shared on the messaging platform.

Considering the favorable images of Biden that the periodical displayed on the cover, notwithstanding his health issues, the story is simply self-incriminating for the magazine", she added.

The response to his queries – what were Time’s editors doing, and why? – may be something to do with creatively capturing a sense of power says Carly Earl, an Australian publication's photo editor.

The image itself is professionally taken," she says. "They selected this photo because they wanted Trump to look heroic. Looking up at a person evokes a feeling of their majesty and his expression actually looks contemplative and almost somewhat divine. It’s not often you see pictures of him in such a serene moment – the photo appears gentle."

His hair seems to vanish because the rear illumination has bleached that section of the image, creating a halo effect, she adds. And, while the feature's heading marries well with the president's look in the image, "it's impossible to satisfy the individual in question."

Nobody enjoys being photographed from below, and although all of the artistic aspects of the image are highly effective, the visual appeal are not flattering."

The Guardian contacted the magazine for feedback.