Stephen Colbert Offers Trump a More ‘Flattering’ Time Cover Mock-Up – With a Brutal Twist

The Late Show host Stephen Colbert turned President Donald Trump’s outrage at Time magazine’s “weird” cover photo of him, offering an alternative that he’d mocked up — featuring the president with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The cover, released Monday, shows Trump gazing upward, backlit by sunlight, under the headline “His Triumph.” The accompanying story praises the president’s U.S.-brokered peace deal as “a signature achievement” and “a strategic turning point for the Middle East.”

The comedian seized on Trump’s Truth Social complaint that the Nov. 10 photo, taken from a notably low angle, “disappeared” his hair and mused it might be “the worst of all time.”

Colbert agreed, deadpan: “He’s right. You got to hand it to him: it is.”

From there, Colbert spun off a series of fake Time covers featuring AI-generated versions of Trump “solving horse crimes” and showing “an extremely casual attitude towards highway safety.”

Then, to raucous applause, Colbert cut to a real photo – Trump alongside Epstein in 1997.

“You want a flattering photo for the cover of Time? How about this one?” Colbert quipped, before mock-editing Epstein out of the frame and replacing Trump instead.

“Wait, hold on, what’s that pervert doing in there? Take that pervert out,” he jibed.

Colbert, who has repeatedly needled Trump over his shifting stance on releasing the Epstein files, punctuated the bit with a jab at Trump’s neck in the controversial photo: “Worst Georgia O’Keeffe ever.”

Rounding on the Time cover one more time, he said he agreed with Trump’s assessment: “There’s a lot going on there. It’s like one of those optical illusions where you can’t tell if it’s an old woman or a young ball sack.”

Watch above via CBS.