Exactly eight years ago this week, Time magazine published a memorable cover story on Steve Bannon. The headline used for the piece inside the magazine asked, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?”
It’s easy to forget, but as Donald Trump’s first term got underway, Bannon was seen as the driving force in the White House. “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert joked in April 2017, “Steve Bannon was removed from the National Security Council. No word on when he’ll step down from his role as president.”
Around the same time, The New York Times reported that Trump “quietly expressed annoyance” at the attention Bannon was receiving. The president was especially unhappy, the report added, about “the ‘President Bannon’ puppet-master theme promoted by magazines, late-night talk shows and Twitter.”
But it was the Time cover that, according to multiple reports, especially bothered Trump, who has long invested great importance in the magazine’s cover images. (At one point, he even took a fake Time magazine cover, featuring his image, and hung it up in at least five of his properties around the world.)
With this in mind, by the summer of 2017, Bannon’s tenure in the West Wing was over. A BBC report on his departure noted, “The cover of Time magazine showed Bannon at the height of his powers, but it may also have set in motion his eventual downfall.”
Eight years to the week after Bannon graced the magazine’s cover, getting Trump’s attention, Time published a similarly striking report. The Hill reported:
A new cover of Time magazine features billionaire Elon Musk behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office at the White House. The photo illustration teased a cover story titled “Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington,” which chronicles his efforts to implement massive government reforms during President Trump’s first weeks in office.
The cover image, showing Musk behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as if he were the real president, is not at all subtle. New cover of TIME muskwatch.com/subscribe To be sure, it’s entirely possible that the president will put aside his legendary insecurities and be entirely unbothered by the magazine’s cover. In fact, after being asked about this, he shrugged it off at a White House event, asking whether Time is still in business. (He felt differently a couple of months ago when the magazine named him as the “Person of the Year” for 2024.) But it’s also possible that Trump, desperate to be the only star in his White House production, will find the image infuriating, and this will mark the beginning of the end of Musk’s powerful role in the administration.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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