Tech billionaires, corporate chieftains and high-profile faces such as Conor McGregor and Carrie Underwood have flocked to Washington to fete Donald Trump. There has been such a stampede of big-money donors that his inaugural committee has run out of VIP tickets and perks. And yet here is the US president-elect, positively glaring in the official photograph his aides released last week in advance of his inauguration.
The image, which will be printed inside the programmes his supporters will clutch on Monday, does not exactly scream celebration. Trump is shown sternly squinting, bathed in eerie, David Lynchian lighting from below, high-powered strobes reflected in his eyes. One entertainment photographer said the lighting and technique is reminiscent of photographer Jill Greenberg’s controversial “End Times” series of crying children.
Whereas other men on the cusp of the presidency have offered anodyne, smiling inaugural images, the photo revealed on Thursday was – as with all things Trump – dramatic and startling. It is certainly reminiscent of the purposeful pose he struck for his mug shot, taken by the Fulton County, Georgia, sheriff’s office in that state’s election interference case.
Asked to interpret the president-elect’s expression in his inauguration photo, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, replied: “America. Is. Back.”
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As a subject, Trump “knows what he’s looking for”, said Shealah Craighead, the chief White House photographer during his first administration. “He’s very hands-on. He will ask to see the photos on the back of the camera or on a computer screen while it’s happening in real time so he can decide if it’s headed in the right direction. If he likes what he sees, then he will ask to see tangible paper prints rather than on a computer.”
Some saw in the image a signal of the retribution and strong hand that Trump promised on the campaign trail. Many of his supporters erupted in glee about the tone they saw it as setting for the new era in Washington. “Dad is home,” Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and media figure, wrote on social platform X.
Others who have studied Trump over the years say that he has been doing a version of this pose for a long time, and that the intense look has evolved from the days of The Apprentice to his mug shot and then his raised fist after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “If Donald Trump’s old Clint Eastwood ‘High Plains Drifter’ squint got married to the Georgia mug shot photo, they would have produced this inauguration photo,” said Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer. “And the fact that Trump signed off on it means he loved it.”
In the past, Trump has told photographers who have taken his portrait that he would like to appear Churchillian. (On the first day of Trump’s first term as president, he restored a bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office.)
This new portrait – which was taken a few weeks ago by Daniel Torok, Trump’s chief photographer – was intended specifically for Monday’s inauguration. Soon, a different photo will be selected as Trump’s official presidential portrait; that image will be distributed to government agencies and to US embassies around the world.
Those official portraits often offer a glimpse of both an individual president’s persona and the mood of the nation.
Pete Souza, who was the White House chief photographer under Barack Obama, said the 44th president did not want to smile much in his official portrait. “We were in the middle of a recession,” Souza said. “I think that probably affected the way we did that first photo where Obama had not a full smile, kind of just, like, a hint of a smile.”
Last time, Trump did smile. His official portrait taken for his first presidency showed him beaming beatifically. It was a hastily arranged photo taken after many months of delay. According to Craighead, who took it, he never seemed to like it all that much. “The photo that you see today is probably the one he would have loved to have back then,” she said.
A scowl is “his favourite pose,” she added. “He doesn’t want to smile because it seems weak, is probably what he would say.” – This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
