Let’s recap what happened that day in Pennsylvania. Someone had tried to kill him. A bullet had grazed his ear, and after he realized he was not gravely injured, he had the presence of mind to create his own reality show moment for the cameras: raising his fist in defiance. Click, click, click. The photo by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press was on the front page of newspapers throughout the country. It soon became a cornerstone of MAGA iconography: a would-be martyr, miraculously resurrected. In several aspects, the image—showing a president looking outward, his security detail surrounding him, graced by the presence of an American flag—is Trumpworld’s version of the Emanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware.
And now a painting based on this photograph has pride of place on the State Floor. For those on White House tours, it is displayed in the most prominent position they pass. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the portrait was displayed “temporarily,” implying that another painting will take its place. Nonetheless, a recent photo posted on his Flickr photostream shows Trump standing in front of the painting with two guests on hand for an Easter prayer service, one of them evangelist Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham). Giving his trademark thumbs up, the president offers a camera-ready grin, seemingly unaware of how his expression and gesture diverge from the gravity of the instant conveyed behind him. It’s a jarring contrast to the moment when, in Trump’s own words, a “vicious monster unleashed evil.”
At the end of the Trump administration, convention dictates that the official White House photostream will be locked and become forever viewable, just as we’re seeing it now, under the propriety of the National Archives. In 60 years, I wonder what people will think as they look back at these albums of photographs. That’s assuming the National Archives still exists.
Pete Souza, who served on the photo staff of President Ronald Reagan, spent eight years as Barack Obama’s chief official White House photographer. Souza, the subject of Dawn Porter’s documentary The Way I See It, has gained renown for his Instagram feed (@petesouza, with 3 million followers), on which he has posted images from his time in the Obama White House—images that contrasted sharply with those from Donald Trump’s first term. These juxtapositions became the subject of his book, Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents, a follow-up to his #1 New York Times bestseller Obama: An Intimate Portrait. In 2022, Souza published The West Wing and Beyond: What I Saw Inside the Presidency.