A picture of an alleged cover page of American weekly magazine TIME is being shared widely on social media. In the picture, a figure can be seen walking out of a door, with claims that the person is none other than US President Donald Trump. The image on the cover is accompanied by the headline, ‘Time to go’. American actor Daniel Newman had tweeted the photo on May 14, 2020, and later took it down.
On May 25, Indian journalist Shobhaa De had also tweeted the picture of the alleged magazine cover. (link to the archived tweet)
Pure brilliance!! pic.twitter.com/4iWIHsvz8x
— Shobhaa De (@DeShobhaa) May 25, 2020
Author Gyan Prakash also tweeted this picture on May 23. Gyan Prakash wrote, “He finally gets a Time cover! Not fake one this time.” (link to the archived tweet)
He finally gets a Time cover! Not fake one this time. pic.twitter.com/X4PHRRAONb
— Gyan Prakash (@Prakashzone) May 23, 2020
In addition to him, journalist Ravish Kumar had also shared the picture and later took it down. We also received some requests to verify the viral image on the official Alt News mobile app.
Fact-check
To look into the authenticity of this image, we rummaged through the archive of the cover pages of past editions of TIME Magazine. We went through cover pictures from 2020 and did not find any with an image of Donald Trump walking out with the caption reading ‘Time to go’.
According to a TIME magazine report from June 20, 2020, Donald Trump has appeared on the cover page of the publication 29 times in total. The video below shows actual cover pages featuring the American president.
Along with this, we found a fact-check report by Reuters from May 21, 2020, quoting a TIME magazine spokesperson, who stated that the viral image is fake.
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