The most controversial foreign magazine covers of 2025

Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS, played a role in some of the most controversial foreign magazine covers of 2025.

The Indian government reportedly tried to block the distribution of an issue of Indian weekly magazine Vikatan, which featured an unflattering cover of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The cover was a cartoon of Modi in handcuffs alongside U.S. President Donald Trump. The cover was a response to reports that Indians were being deported from the U.S. in handcuffs.
See article by the Daily Cartoonist.

British satirical magazine Private Eye went viral with a cover that took aim Trump’s supposed adulation of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
See article by HuffPost.

The Economist cover about Trump’s first 100 days of his second term also went viral. It featured an image of a wounded and bandaged symbolic eagle under the headline “Only 1,361 Days To Go.” The magazine is counting down the days until Trump leaves office.
See articles by BuzzFeed and HuffPost.

In May, the Vietmanese government banned an issue of the Economist that featured an illustration of Vietnam’s top leader, Communist party General Secretary To Lam, on its cover.
The image showed Lam with stars on his eyes, alongside the headline “The man with a plan for Vietnam,” with the subhead: “A Communist party hard man has to rescue Asia’s great success story.”
See articles by the Guardian and Reuters.

An Irish government-funded magazine, Comhar, sparked outrage with its July cover. The cover image showed a presumably Israeli couple in swimwear lying on a beach next to a bloodied amputee with barbed wire dividing them. Jewish symbols dotted the wire that split the amputee from the bathers, prompting backlash from Jewish community groups. The article comes amid the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
See article by the Jewish Chronicle.

And finally, Glamour UK caused controversy when it named nine males with transgender identities among its “women of the year.”
British political commentator Piers Morgan said in a post on X that the issue was “beyond parody even by ludicrous woke virtue-signaling standards.”
See articles by Fox News and the Sunday Times.