Trump pictured holding real, live American bald eagle in Time magazine
“Deal with it.”
Donald Trump appears on the cover of Time magazine this week — but it’s not the cover that’s drawing the most attention.
Inside, the Republican presidential frontrunner is pictured standing in his 25th-floor office in midtown Manhattan holding an eagle.
Like, a real, living bald eagle — the national emblem of the United States and a bird that spent decades on the endangered species list.
Nancy Gibbs, Time’s managing editor, said the magazine flew the American bald eagle in from Texas at the request of photographer Martin Schoeller because Trump is a tough subject to shoot.
“He’s very difficult to photograph,” Schoeller said in an interview accompanying the cover story. “If you ask him to look up a little bit, he says no or he just doesn’t do it. He literally has one angle. If I ask him to smile, he puts on a big grin and then he goes back to his Zoolander ‘blue steel’ look. And the ‘blue steel’ stays for as long as it takes to get the photograph.”
Schoeller says the eagle idea was inspired by Trump’s trademarked campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again.”
“I thought he might be open to it, considering he’s a man who loves attention,” Schoeller said. “He likes controversy, and he likes to be in the spotlight.”
The 27-year-old eagle — named Uncle Sam — is owned by master falconer Jonathan Wood, who traveled with the bird to Trump Tower.
According to the magazine, Wood felt the shoot went well.
“Donald Trump is an icon,” Wood said, “and this bald eagle is an icon.”
In his interview with Time’s Michael Scherer, Trump dismissed critics who said his noisy arrival at the Iowa State Fair last weekend — in a helicopter — could hurt him with potential caucus-goers who might not see him as a real “man of the people.”
“They don’t want that,” Trump said. “They want someone who’s going to beat China, beat Japan.”
“I don’t think the people running for office are real,” the former “Celebrity Apprentice” host said of his competition in the 2016 presidential race. “They have to throw a lot of consultants away and be themselves. I think it is one of the things that has helped me.”
In New Hampshire Wednesday sans eagle, Trump held a town hall meeting where he took questions on immigration and threw jabs at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
“The only thing constant is Trump,” Trump told reporters at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, N.H., about 10 miles east of Merrimack, where Bush was speaking at his own town hall forum.
“Right down the road, we have Jeb. Very small crowd,” Trump told the crowd. “You know what’s happening to Jeb’s crowd? They’re sleeping!”
The appearance was Trump’s first on the campaign trail since releasing his controversial immigration plan that calls for a wall across the southern border to be paid for by Mexico, the defunding of so-called sanctuary cities and the “mandatory return of all criminal aliens” to their home countries — including birthright citizens protected by the 14th Amendment.
Trump promised he would be releasing “a lot of policy positions” in the near future, but added, “I actually think the press wants the so-called policy positions more than the people, if you wanna know the truth.”
