Forged Fronts

Almost ten years ago, the MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski argued on live television, “Nothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a magazine about himself.” If I’m being honest, I can’t say that I completely disagreed with her.

In his memoir Squandering Aimlessly: My Adventures in the American Marketplace, from 2000, the business journalist David Brancaccio recalled a store in Minnesota’s Mall of America that used a video camera to “superimpose one’s face on a fake magazine cover.” When he learned the price for an eight by ten was $17, he simply walked out — only to return moments later for a copy of Casino Player Monthly featuring his own likeness. Really, who could say no?

It’s not just novelty shops in the fake magazine sector. In Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777, published well before his shameful fall from grace, the British journalist Karl Sabbagh wrote of dummy periodicals hanging in the offices of Boeing executives. And back in 2004, Molson Breweries hired the agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky to do a series of imitation covers for the made‑up rags Animal Rescuer, Aspiring Groom, and Trustfund. Those won recognition at the ANDY Awards for creative excellence in advertising.

In my various editorial roles, I’ve helped put together several fake covers, though they have always benefited from a real imprimatur. These keepsakes — with official word marks and high production values — have often honoured major donors or retiring board members. In fact, I have a copy of one hanging in my office. It depicts me and my board chair, John Macfarlane, hard at work making magazines on a Gutenberg press. Actual contributors to the Literary Review of Canada provided skyline text as well as original art.

Occasionally, sanctioned fakes go beyond the editor’s office and circulate publicly. In 2008, for example, Vanity Fair published a mock‑up on its website portraying the Republican nominee for president John McCain using a walker and fist-bumping his pill-popping wife, Cindy, in what appears to be the Oval Office. This was an act of “empathy and better-you-than-us relief” after The New Yorker got into hot water for Barry Blitt’s now infamous cover showing Barack and Michelle Obama, with the Democratic presidential nominee in stereotypical Arab dress and his wife toting a machine gun strapped to her back.

Today it’s easier than ever to create your own personalized cover: just ask ChatGPT to do it or download any number of apps, such as Cover Me and the better-rated Magazine Cover Maker. Despite the proliferation of fakes, however, the best-known example remains the ersatz issue of Time that Donald Trump had mounted at several of his clubs, including Mar-a-Lago.

“The ‘Apprentice’ Is a Television Smash!” one pretend headline proclaimed. “Trump Is Hitting on All Fronts . . . Even TV!” shouted the attic. Unlike most fakes, including those I’ve steered, this one even had a bar code. “I’m really rich,” the billionaire president likes to remind us every chance he gets. I guess he could afford the extra effort — but not the fact-checker to get the layout details right.

After the Washington Post first reported on Covergate in 2017, Time asked Trump to remove the offending decor, which is what prompted Brzezinski to make her quip. Perhaps because my hands are not clean when it comes to souvenir ephemera, I thought the whole racket was overblown. After all, this was the same man who once boasted of a veteran handing him a Purple Heart, the prestigious military decoration awarded to Americans wounded or killed in service. “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart,” Trump said in 2016, his supposed heel spurs notwithstanding. “This was much easier.”

Much easier too was how Trump finally got his grabby little hands on a Nobel Peace Prize in mid-January, when the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado left hers at the White House, over the objections of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. “A medal can change owners,” it did concede, “but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate cannot.”

None of us are surprised at this point, and surely that’s by design. Service members are known to pass along their decorations. Champions are entitled to bestow their hardware on anyone they cho0se, as the legendary distance runner Emil Zátopek did in 1966, when he quietly gave the Australian Ron Clarke one of his four Olympic golds. And fake magazine covers can be delightfully harmless, especially when done right. Donald Trump knows all of this, and he relishes how commentary about his vanity shields him from more substantive scrutiny of his reckless remaking of the world order.

So let him further tart up the Oval Office with laurels he did not earn. Of all his actions, decorating is hardly the most alarming.