US snapshot of Donald Trump’s hunger for adulation that has dragged us to this fraught moment
Sometimes a candid photograph captures a moment in a presidency, and the essence of the officeholder, so tellingly that you get a penetrating portrait of an era. It happened when LBJ ( Lyndon B Johnson ) yanked up his beagle by the ears for photographers and demonstrated his domineering leadership style. It happened when a photographer captured George W Bush being told, while reading to children in a Florida classroom, that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. His look of shock raised questions about whether, after his decades of winging it, a parlous rendezvous with destiny might be too much for him to handle. It happened in 2009 when every living president gathered in the Oval office and Jimmy Carter so obviously kept his distance from Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and both Bushes that his sense of superiority was made clear. It happened when Obama was photographed bending over in the Oval to let a black child touch his hair, to see if it was the same texture as his own, capturing the historic nature of his election. It happened again when Doug Mills, the New York Times’ dazzling White House photographer, took a picture Tuesday of president Donald Trump on Marine One with his blond aides/acolytes Katie Zacharia, his wobbly new press secretary, and Natalie Harp, his special assistant for floofing. Mills took the shot from far away with a long lens, but it bristles with intimacy. The president is leaning in to talk to the two Ivanka knock-offs, who look like sorority-sister clones, four eyes glued on the man they adore, two fervent smiles glazed with pink lip gloss. Katie Zacharia was fired after failing in the one arena Trump cares about: television It is a snapshot of Trump’s hunger for adulation that has dragged us to this fraught moment in the United States. He desperately craves being the centre of attention and seeing blind devotion mirrored back at him as that devotion wanes with an increasingly disgusted, exhausted public. Trump was on a trip, part of a self-affirming odyssey to red states, which seemed to be designed not only to boost his unappetising slate of candidates but also to let him bask in applause from the last fanatical members of his dwindling fan base. In Mills’ photo, marines are at attention beside the curved open doors of the helicopter, giving the impression that we are peering inside a bubble – at the very moment that Trump’s White House bubble is getting smaller and more ingrown and fractious than ever. Here he is in a cozy huddle with his most essential type of staff member: obedient helpmeets who help construct and perpetuate his absurd alternative reality and paranoid worldview. Zacharia, the inept propagandist, and Harp, the so-called “human printer”, who trails – and sometimes sprints – behind the president with a portable printer, giving hard copies of soft coverage to Trump, offering him validation for his delusions and lies. Zacharia reposted Mills’ photo with the caption, “Best President in US History!!!” But it really should have been the classic Henry Kissinger line: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Trump puts new Russia sanctions passed by Congress on hold amid deepening row with Ukraine Wags on X had their own captions, imagining Harp thinking homicidal thoughts about Zacharia. But actually, the two women – scorned by colleagues eager to anonymously trash-talk them – were cloistered on the edge of the playground, clinging to each other and to their orange prophet, who told them to hang in there. But it didn’t last, and by Friday, he was easing Zacharia out. “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” Trump told her, as he later recounted to reporters. Soon after, she got the boot. They were trying to fight back against their in-house critics. Harp showed Trump the Politico Playbook story Thursday reporting that the president is shopping around for a new chief of staff. It also named the advisers who have cashed in. The right to cash in, in Trump’s eyes, is for him and his family only. “Trump has bristled at recent reports showing several long-time advisers are profiting from foreign consulting business,” Playbook said, noting that Susie Wiles’ daughter Katie is working for a firm representing Republika Srpska, a pro-Russian Bosnian Serb territory. The Daily Beast headline about the Wiles report blared: “Natalie Harp Knifes Ice Maiden and Sparks Trump ‘Freakout.’” Tellingly and perhaps prophetically, Susie Wiles is in Mills’ picture but mostly cut out of the frame. You can see her legs in red pants and the Louis Vuitton bag on her lap. We can’t see the expression on Wiles’ face, but we know that she is no fan of the two gushing young women in the picture. Alarmed by Harp’s fixation on the president and her emotionally raw letters to him in 2023, Wiles attempted – in vain – to curb her access. Trump’s decision to appoint Zacharia to a critical job where she was doomed to flounder and likely end up in an “SNL” cold open blindsided Wiles, according to news reports. Even Trump seemed taken aback by the press gaggle after Zacharia’s debut news conference debacle and when the Times’ Shawn McCreesh, before the president and his aides took off for Alaska, asked Zacharia where she had passed the bar. “When I moved to China,” she said, as Trump – who described her as an attorney when he announced her appointment – snapped his head around. The story unspooled that she hadn’t passed the bar anywhere. But by the time they got to Alaska eight hours later, she was beaming at her boss and doing damage control. (She told a far-right Pizzagate conspiracist in an interview that she wanted to be played on “SNL” by “a Scarlett Johansson-type character.”) Zacharia tried to fight back on “Hannity,” no doubt assuming she would be in friendly territory. But she wasn’t. Sean Hannity asked her why she had put up 15 media posts identifying herself as an attorney. She lamely protested that they were “retweets of a title that had been given”. (Mistakes were made.) Hannity pressed on: “Why didn’t you just say ‘I never practised law’?” and asked about her first news conference, “Why only three questions in 14 minutes?” Zacharia looked unnerved, as though she had been sandbagged by her foes in the White House. As his hold on the country seems to be slipping through his pudgy fingers, Trump needs the unqualified love from his blond Praetorian Guard. Not only do Democrats seem headed for success in the midterms, fuelled by a swell of Americans who see Trump as a crook, enriching himself while costs rise for everyone else, but the president’s inner circle is going up in flames. Aides are turning on one another and sinking in a cauldron of corruption and boneheaded policies. Trump’s new press secretary faces mounting questions over her legal credentials The past week has been a cascade of embarrassing stories: Kimberly Guilfoyle getting iced as ambassador to Greece after a donor revealed that just before her Senate confirmation hearing, she tried to shake him down to pay her $100,000 American Express bill; Trump loyalist Ric Grenell, who was the head of the ill-fated Kennedy Center, accused by Trump loyalist Alina Habba Mildon and her new billionaire husband of misallocating a $5.6 million donation marked for the centre; and our ally Volodymyr Zelenskiy saying he felt betrayed by Trump’s sordid deal with Vladimir Putin over diesel oil and the restricted access to Elon Musk’s Starshield amid Russian bombardment. Trump even had to cancel the nitwit plan of his frat boy Pentagon chief to livestream an execution. Instead of running the country and dealing with the world he has set on fire, the president is focused on settling petty squabbles and a web of corruption in his incompetent – and dangerous – court. Doug Mills has proved once again that a picture is worth 1,000 words, or in my case, 1,273. This article originally appeared in The New York Times