Sometimes when Donald Trump says something bizarre, it’s pretty easy to figure out where he’s coming from. For instance, why does he keep talking about dying in a shark attack? Because he has a sharkphobia and lives every week like it’s Shark Week. Other times, you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what the heck he’s even talking about.
His remarks about Kamala Harris’s new Time magazine cover seem to fall into the second category. During his glitchy and rambling conversation with Elon Musk on Monday night, he complained that the cover makes the vice-president look like his wife, Melania:
But she’s getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her on Time magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing, and actually, she looked very much like our great First Lady Melania. She didn’t look like Camilla [Kamala], that’s right. But of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that, right?
Let’s break this down. Trump complains that the media is giving Harris a “free ride.” The evidence he cites is that she looks too good on the cover of Time magazine. This probably isn’t the first example most people would come up with, but it makes sense that this cover has gotten under Trump’s skin. He’s famously obsessed with the magazine, to the point that he has fake Time covers featuring himself hanging up in his clubs.
But the Time cover is a pretty accurate representation of Harris. The proof: while it looks like it might be a freehand “drawing,” as Trump put it, the photo credit says, “Photo-illustration by Neil Jamieson for TIME (Source Photos: Harris: Andrew Harnik — Getty Images; Getty Images (2)).” It appears to be an actual photograph of Harris from July 22, 2024, layered over another photo of her supporters. The color and style were digitally altered, but the shape of Harris’s face looks exactly the same on the cover; the supposedly biased Time editors didn’t even remove her wrinkles.
Next, Trump claims Harris looks like Melania on the cover. Here’s the former First Lady in a similar pose:
Maybe Trump said “most beautiful actress” and that made him think of his former model wife. But aside from the fact that they are both human women in their 50s, Harris and Trump’s features aren’t very similar.
And why did Trump very clearly say “Camilla,” not “Kamala”? Some social media users suggested he was referring to Britain’s queen consort, Camilla. Trump’s remark could be read as “[Kamala] looked very much like our great first lady, Melania. She didn’t look like [Queen] Camilla.” But while it’s true that Harris doesn’t look anything like King Charles’s wife, this is a stretch. The likelier explanation is that Trump is exploring new ways to mispronounce Harris’s first name.
Trump complimented Harris, saying, “She’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that, right?” But it seems like this was a backhanded remark he threw in because he realized he was going to get flak for implying that Harris isn’t really as attractive as she looked on the Time cover.
So after further analysis, parts of Trump’s comments about the magazine cover make a bit more sense. But the broader question here remains unanswered: If Trump is trying to fight the perception that he’s weird and incoherent, why say Harris looks like his wife on her Time cover when she clearly doesn’t?
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