By now you’ve seen them. The portraits of members of the White House employees taken by Christopher Anderson to accompany Vanity Fair’s two-part sequence 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, beneath unforgiving lighting, revealing each blemish and pore.
A number of has been made, each from Trump’s supporters and detractors, of how comically unflattering the photographs are, mercilessly revealing Leavitt’s lip filler injection marks or the veins in Vance’s nostril — however I believe what actually will get everybody about them is how frail, how unavoidably human it makes the staffers of essentially the most brazenly authoritarian White House in historical past look.
