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Critic’s Notebook
The official photograph of the president’s second term has the gloss of his 1980s architecture, but its A.I.-like haze is pure 2025.
By Jason Farago
A critic at large, Jason Farago explores culture within broader currents of politics, economics, technology and the environment.
June 4, 2025Updated 2:15 p.m. ET
President Trump has a new official photographic portrait — his fourth since 2017, two produced during administrative transitions and two in the first months of his nonconsecutive terms. We have come a long way from the Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, in which the Virginian general stands at his desk with stiff republican reserve.
The new official image, shot by the government photographer Daniel Torok, presents the incumbent in tight close-up and obscure quarters. Its lighting is immoderate, its tone forbidding, but compared to the last one its subject’s mood has actually brightened.
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For that previous portrait, released at the time of the presidential transition in January 2025, Mr. Torok used egregious spotlighting from below that gave Mr. Trump the mien of a horror movie villain. The ex-president become president-elect glowered and squinted, in marked imitation of his mug shot taken at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta.
The new portrait, by contrast, displays a classically Trumpian tonal incongruity; for all the darkness, note the humor. The lighting is more head-on. Mr. Trump’s shoulders are relaxed, his affect has softened. His neutral expression is moderated by a slight warmth in the eyes — a classic pose that a younger generation, following the supermodel Tyra Banks, knows to call “smizing.”
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