By now you’ve seen them. The portraits of members of the White House staff taken by Christopher Anderson to accompany Vanity Fair’s two-part series on Trump’s second administration are extraordinary.
Vice President JD Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others are shot in tight, tight close-ups, under unforgiving lighting, revealing every blemish and pore.
A lot of has been made, both from Trump’s supporters and detractors, of how comically unflattering the pictures are, mercilessly revealing Leavitt’s lip filler injection marks or the veins in Vance’s nose — but I suspect what really gets everyone about them is how frail, how unavoidably human it makes the staffers of the most openly authoritarian White House in history look.