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I wasn’t the only one who thought of how Trump didn’t come up with an iconic photo of himself in the situation room to compare with the photo of President Obama during the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. A verified poster on X named J. Leigh, who is from Hawaii, also came up with the idea. (As I write this they have posted many times.)
Below are some of the photos which were posted on the White House X page (link). Below, on the top is the group photo which comes the closest and an enlargement of the portion with Trump looking stern and serious and as if he just might be in charge.
If you don’t count the carefully orchestrated Golden Elevator video, Trump has had two iconic photos come out of his presidency, the mugshot photo and the post-shooting fist raised photo.
I'd have thought he would have been able to come up with another iconic image from the Situation Room to show what manly man master of the universe he was. If there was such a photo articles like this on MSN would have had them on the top of their stories.
This is from USA Today:
If there was any dramatic photo which shows someone truly engaged and in charge during the attack it was the one below of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine who was sitting next to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
When I thought of writing this last night at 2:00AM I hadn’t seen any of these photos. I wondered whether Trump would be wearing his red MAGA hat in the photos. I pondered “does he even consider how ridiculous he looks when he wears the hat indoors?” Being a shrink, I asked myself whether at an unconscious level he feels exposed or naked when he’s not wearing his hat. We know he is very much aware of, and sensitive about, his thinning hair.
How successful this bombing was will be determined over the next days and weeks when we see if it leads to a sustained ceasefire and to Iran agreeing to an enforceable agreement not to develop neuclar weapons.
What was not successful is that there was no Trump iconography coming out of it. Trump certainly knows how powerful images are. He’s always posing. If he doesn’t have a real photo to post he’ll have one made with AI, whether for his superhero images or to be used in other self-aggrandizing endevaors. Here’s one he put on social media (read article).
As I thought about iconic images, before I even got out of bed this morning, many of them came to mind. I thought of the photos from Iwo Jima, of the naked napalm victim boy in Vietnam, of the march at the Edmund Pettus bridge, of the man on the balcony pointing after Martin Luther King was shot, of Jack Ruby being shot, and of course of Jackie holding JFK after he was shot, of the young woman cradling the student who’d been shot at Kent State, of a South Vietnamese General firing his pistol into the head of suspected Viet Cong. There’s obviously a theme here.
All of these, with the exception of the Iwo Jima photo which was posed to some extent and the Edmund Pettus Bidge photo, were taken in the moment. The photographer had little or no time to compose the photo.
Trump had ample time to set up his Situation Room photo. Instead all he managed to do was to make sure he looked approrpriately engaged and serious. In two of the photos he looked exactly the same way:
I can’t help not being able to get past that damn stupid hat…
If anyone looked like they were in charge it was General Caine:
He knows that soldiers don’t wear hats, or in military parlance, covers, indoors.
Soldiers, from General like Caine, shown below on the left, to privates, wear their covers outdoors but not indoors.
In fact, he was asked duing his confirmation hearing whether he ever wore a MAGA hat. (Watch video)
Trump of course isn’t a soldier. He never was. He never will be.
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