The Trump presidency has set many things in motion, almost all of which have been irredeemably dreadful. But one positive (if you can call it that, which I’m not sure you can) to come out of this, has been some amazing magazine covers, across the world, depicting the new American president in his many guises. Here’s a potted rundown of the best covers (with some not-so-good thrown in for balance).

It seems sensible to start with the November covers, the ones that are a reaction to Trump’s victory, rather than any of his actions. The most iconic of these was probably from Germany magazine Der Spiegel which depicted the hairpiece/asteroid on a collision course with Earth. This cover is by Edel Rodriguez, a Cuban artist who features prominently on this list. Ingeniously, the German editorial team went for the tagline ‘DAS ENDE DER WELT’, which makes sense in English even if, like me, you have no knowledge of German. Perhaps the objectivity of continental Europe left them better placed to illustrate the earthquake that was happening in the US.

The UK’s two weekly current affair magazines went for differing perspectives on the Trump victory. The New Statesman did a not-wholly-convincing photoshop of Trump as a nuclear explosion (I get the thinking: the hair is pretty much the same colour as the iconic mushroom cloud), but the merging of the images is too crude for it to really sing. And, in a vintage few months for illustration, it feels a bit tacky to cook this up on a computer.

The Spectator, meanwhile, continued to flirt with supporting Trump, but Morten Morland’s design cleverly uses the image of Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler (or Hynkel, for cinema purists) from The Great Dictator spinning the globe. The result is a cover that plays to both camps: it shows Trump in a wash of gold in the Oval Office, but also introduces the idea of a dictatorship at a point where few magazines were going there.

The honour of the most consistently high quality Trump covers might be given to TIME magazine, particularly for their pre and post election diptych of molten Trump visages (both by Edel Rodriguez). As with Der Spiegel they don’t need to over-complicate the visuals, allowing the Trump hair and pout to do the talk. Back in the August before the election, they went with a ‘Meltdown’ cover:

But if that felt hyperbolic at the time, it gave them little room to back down when Trump’s campaign looked in crisis. The ‘Meltdown’ cover has Trump in a pose that evokes Munch’s ‘The Scream’ — except, presumably, he’s screaming at someone, rather than screaming in horror — and the drama is so high-strung that it’s a hard cover to build on. The ‘Total meltdown’ cover is a very clever way of doing that. The image is deflated and anti-climactic, the opposite of the nuclear holocaust the New Statesman ran with. It worked brilliantly at the time, capturing something of the senseless incredulity felt by the media. It is absurd and silly, but reflective of an emotion that wasn’t yet anger. Shame the meltdown wasn’t actually total…

Disbelief about the Trump presidency means some of the 2015 and early-2016 covers have aged badly. This TIME cover, for example, presents a Trump presidency as something highly unlikely but relatively serious. It predates a move towards seeing Trump as an aggressive threat to liberal democracy, and I think captures a mood that has been lost to time and, in places, condemned.

There was an element of hubris in some of the Trump magazine covers that doesn’t play well in 2017. New York magazine’s ‘LOSER’ cover was punchy at the time but now looks almost like an advert for the insurgent movement that won Trump the Presidency.

Their cover from 2015 actually plays better. It depicts Trump as George Washington, and whilst I don’t think there’s as much irony in the image as their feels upon reflection, it says a lot about Trump’s self-image and the explosive origin story of Trumpism.

The Economist produced a beaming facsimile in January 2017, as Trump’s presidential credentials were confirmed at his inauguration, but the Photoshop work — as I seem to often find myself saying — is sub-par, and the result is something that doesn’t work nearly as effectively as the New York magazine cover.

And Trump as an historic nationalist figure wasn’t just used once. The Economist dressed Trump (along with Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage) up as the three musicians in Archibald Willard’s Yankee Doodle painting, which depicts three musicians during the American Revolution. It was painted in 1876, when America was engaged in a bloody expansion through Sioux territories. I don’t think this subtext is really presented in the cover (which is oddly a mirror reversal of Willard’s painting, and includes Marine Le Pen as Delacroix’s Liberty) but the same idea is there: Trump isn’t without antecedents or icons. Trump’s supporters love to see themselves as American revolutionaries, and I’m sure the editors of these magazines would argue that they are mocking — or pointing out the contrast — between Trump and the formation of the United States.

The Economist had been pretty reliably poor with its Trump covers, preferring cliche to originality wherever possible. The ‘Really?’ cover is particularly lazy (not wildly dissimilar, but much less effective, to their ‘Theresa Maybe’ cover). The Uncle Sam painting is really nicely done, so why stick such a dodgy photoshop on top?

Their ‘The debasing of American politics’ was a better idea but executed so bizarrely that it’s hard to know exactly what they intended. Unless someone squinted very closely at the newsstand, this just appears to be an elephant taking a shit (which I guess is partly the point, but still).

The elephant was, of course, a reliable symbol for designers everywhere. It’s an easy way to set Trump at odds with the Republican establishment. Whilst historically the elephant would’ve been part of their image of the Republican nominee, in these series of covers it is set at odds with Trump. So each of these covers have at least two characters: Trump (represented by his own, iconic, image) and the GOP (represented by the elephant). At times this means the covers can feel cluttered, like this classic New Yorker watercolour (Barry Blitt). The New Yorker covers are either really good or really self-conscious, and I think this is in the latter camp.

I get what they’re going for, but you end up with the GOP being cut in two, with Trump standing back from both halves, which seems a slightly confused metaphor. Better, I think, is the image of Trump riding (even taming) an unwieldy elephant. This is something that The Economist went for, although their elephant just looks kind of grumpy, which I don’t think really reflected the anger within the Republican establishment.

Better was this Spectator cover (Morten Morland), which showed Trump crashing the elephant. On reflection, the triumph on Trump’s face, coupled with the mangled body of the Republican elephant, pretty much summed up the election.

After the election, however, Trump’s relationship with his party ceased to be headline news and the elephant metaphor was shelved for another four years. So what should be the visual analogy du jour to replace it? Well, this post-inauguration cover from the New Yorker leads the way by showing a flameless Statue of Liberty (John W. Tomac). You might expect this metaphor from such a quintessentially New York magazine, but it seems like publications around the country and world were also ready to use Liberty Island’s icon as an image for Trump’s brutality.

The Spectator had already combined this image with Trump’s own profile to create a spittingly angry vision of this new American symbol (Morten Morland). It’s also suitably rude and defiant, summing up Trump supporters’ indifference to their leader’s shortcomings.

The New Statesman went for a post-inauguration cover that shows Libertas crowned with barbed wire (André Carrilho). The liberal media has been making a lot of associations between Trump and Nazi Germany, and this is a much more effective visual play on that idea that most. The mangled barbed wire — rather than the straight lines that we strongly associate with the holocaust — is also illustrative of the so-called ‘American Carnage’, the badly organised madness, of the first weeks of the Trump administration.

It’s also a rare example of the Statue of Liberty being used as an ornament, rather than as a personification (although she is weeping blood, which is a bit more on-the-nose). The Economist early on went for a sighing, fatigued Libertas, which was actually one of their most effective images from the campaign.

After their Trump/asteroid cover, Der Speigel had set themselves a big task to attract international attention with a post-inauguration cover. They went with the Statue of Liberty image as well, with an audacious cover that shows Trump holding the decapitated, blood-soaked head of Libertas. Non-American magazines don’t have to worry about Trump supporters, so their newsstand presence can be more savagely critical than their American counterparts. We’ve seen the New Statesman draw parallels with the nuclear bombings of WWII and the holocaust, and the Der Spiegel cover (Edel Rodriguez) even seems to evoke images of the Islamic State and other terrorist organisations. In a way, this metaphor is more fitting, as it tackles Trump in his own rhetorical yard, rather than relying on the sombre weight of history.

The ‘AMERICA FIRST’ slogan they go for is also key for magazine designers. Trump versus the rest of the world can be portrayed in many striking ways, such as this New Statesman cover that sees Trump licking a lollypop shaped like the globe (André Carrilho). I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be weirdly sexual, but I like the way it depicts Trump not as a fundamentally aggressive ruler, but as someone toying with the world and acting like Violet Beauregarde.

The New Yorker have also done a couple of infantilising covers, both by Barry Blitt. The first sees a childish Trump bombing into a pool filled with Republican stalwarts. This is from way back in the halcyon days of 2015, but remains one of the best visualisations of the Trump phenomenon.

More recently, they went with an illustration of Trump, a suited businessman, in a toy car. The play on the unreality and pretence of the Trump regime, coupled with the static grounding of the car, is strong. They released a digital only version that moves (I presume that the actual magazine cover doesn’t move, but I didn’t double check), which adds literally nothing. Gimmicks aside, this is another strong cover and shows that Trump as a spoilt brat is one of the best ways of drawing him.

On the other hand, if you’re not going to go with a depiction that infantilises him, you could go to the other extreme. The Economist dipped into the Banksy playbook for their ‘Insurgent in the White House’ cover but it nicely captures the outsider status of the movement. The Molotov cocktail is exactly the weapon (in terms of visual metaphors) of the Trump world. Sadly it is a bit too Banksy, and, again, The Economist leant heavily on visual cliche, but the basic idea is strong and runs opposed to the more organised, dystopic versions of the Trump administration. Here, he is the rebel leader who has mysteriously gained power, rather than the ruthless machine that has rolled through the opposition, which I think is probably a more accurate representation of what went down.

But if you are going to do a tentative Hitler/Mussolini comparison, do it with the panache of this The Atlantic cover. Like many of the best Trump covers, it doesn’t show the man full-on, but from behind, addressing a rally of supporters. It’s clever that it evokes Hitler — and the presence of the word ‘autocracy’ might be a stimulus there — because the image is something we saw time after time on the campaign trail. And that’s what makes the central premise of the magazine piece more chilling: it works somewhere within the intersection between reality and fantasy, what is and what might be.

Flipping that Trump image around, this TIME cover shows the President in a stormy, swirling Oval Office, staring blankly at the portraitist. It’s a clever twist on the ‘This is fine’ meme, going with a ‘Nothing to See Here’ tagline which is a nice, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, salvo to the media frenzy around Trump (which this rundown is a wee bit complicit in).

The ‘This is fine’ meme isn’t the only one to make an appearance on a magazine cover. This, from Bloomberg Business is all the more effective for the fact you wouldn’t expect it from a publication like Bloomberg. It’s sort-of funny (probably funnier if you’re not aware of how creative this meme is in the amateur ranks of Twitter) and manages the two-punch of depicting the ridiculousness of the Trump pose and also the vague futility of meme-based resistance.

And finally, the magazine cover that most encapsulated the spirit of the Trump victory was this post-election effort from the New Yorker (Bob Staake). The Wall was the metaphor from the election, summing up Trump’s strengths to his supporters and weaknesses to his detractors. This cover, unlike most New Yorker covers, actually finds a balance: you can imagine that some Trump supporters hang this in their homes, because, after all, they want this wall built. It’s a beautiful way of using the magazine format to show the shutting out of the world, both literally and figuratively, and the way it consumes the page (interacting with the text) shows the colonisation of Trump’s influence. This is the most singularly despairing cover of the lot, and the most effectively ambivalent about what America’s future holds.