Trump sparks intrigue by ditching a 50-year tradition in his new presidential portrait
Donald Trump 's decision to go with a 'dark MAGA' look in his new official photo jettisoned a 50-year tradition in presidential portraits of incorporating Old Glory into the image.
Trump, who famously hugged the American flag on stage at CPAC in 2019 and 2020, opted for a portrait without the Stars and Stripes in the background.
Instead, his new official presidential portrait features a closely cropped image of his face with a dark background.
That makes him the first president since Richard Nixon not to have himself pictured in front of the American flag.
(Trump is sporting his American flag pin, a modern fixture for presidents and politicians).
The preceding nine presidents – along with Trump – chose to have an image in front of the flag as their official portrait.
That includes the official portrait Trump used for the first weeks of his administration.
Those portraits date all the way to the era when presidential portraits were in black and white.
'Is Trump the first president to not have any flag in the background of their official portrait?' asked the rockypoliticss account on X.
That was a question that the New York Times tracked down, flagging Library of Congress images revealing every presidential portrait back to 1974 had Old Glory in it.
Gushing about the new portrait was Sebastian Gorka, the British-Hungarian-American who serves as Trump's senior director for counterterrorism.
'President @realDonaldTrump's new portrait has been deployed at the @WhiteHouse. I loved the original, but this may be even more MAGA,' he wrote.
The new official portrait is already up on the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. DailyMail.com has reached out to the White House for comment about the new portrait.
The flurry of interest over Trump's new portrait comes as it was revealed that he is continuing to use a 2019 image of himself as the lock screen picture for his iPhone.
Trump's new official portrait pictures a stern-faced president over an all-black background – and shows indications of a heavy-handed photo-shop tools.
The portrait replaces the one then president-elect Trump released three days before his inauguration.
That portrait drew a striking resemblance to Trump's mugshot taken at the Fulton County jail during his reelection campaign after being charged with a racketeering conspiracy to overturn the state's election results. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ultimately dismissed several of the charges and the case stalled.
The White House released a new official version Monday in the form of a video clip of an aide hanging the new portrait on a wall that was posted on X.
It shows Trump looking straight ahead, and squinting, wearing a light blue suit and sporting an American flag pin.
It reveals a slight downgrade in the intensity of his prior portrait, which captured Trump with an eyebrow raised and appearing to glower – after reclaiming the White House while railing against 'witch hunts' against him and enduring two assassination attempts.
That portrait now hangs in government buildings around the country.
Experts immediately pointed to hallmarks of photo-shop, including changes that could obscure loose skin below the president's chin.
Trump, 78, prizes physical prowess and recently called former President Joe Biden a 'decrepit corpse.'
The new portrait does show bags under Trump's eyes, which are somehow absent in the Trump portrait from January, which features much starker lighting.
Topping both may be Trump's mug shot, which show Trump gazing downward the first time he was charged with a crime. Aides hanged a newspaper photograph of that portrait soon after Trump took office.
It was one of many changes that Trump added to the Oval Office.
DailyMail.com has asked the White House for information on the new portrait. The earlier one was taken by chief White House official photographer Daniel Torok.
In April, Trump hung a stark portrait of himself between paintings of former first ladies Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton.
A month earlier, Trump railed against an 'unflattering' portrait of himself that legisators hung in the Colorado state Capitol building.
'Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves,' Trump wrote on Truth Social about the painting.
'But the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor... was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,' Trump complained, prompting legislators to remove it.
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The Independent
26 minutes ago
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'Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong.' Rejection and repositioning He says he's disgusted by the bill. Disgust is one of the most primitive of all the emotions. A survival mechanism – you must avoid what disgusts you. He's social signalling here, alerting others, warning them that there's something disgusting in the camp. Musk is highly attuned to public perception, perhaps even more so than Trump (which is saying something). With his acquisition of X (formerly Twitter), Musk was able to direct (and add to) online discourse, shaping public conversations. Psychologically, Musk's rejection of Trump is an attempt to simultaneously elevate himself and diminish the man behind the bill. He can call out the president's action like nobody else. He is positioning himself anew as that free thinker, that risk taker, innovative, courageous, unfettered by any ties. That is his personality, his brand – and he's reasserting it. But it's also a vengeful act. And it's perhaps reminiscent of another political insider (and geek), former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings, who was sacked by the then UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, in 2020. Cummings was accused of masterminding leaks about the social gatherings in Downing Street. He went on to criticize Johnson as lacking the necessary discipline and focus for a prime minister as well as questioning his competence and decision-making abilities. The revenge of a self-proclaimed genius. And revenge is sweet. In a 2004 study, researchers scanned participants' brains using positron emission tomography (PET) – a medical imaging technique that is used to study brain function (among other things) – while the participants played an economic game based on trust. When trust was violated, participants wanted revenge, and this was reflected in increased activity in the reward-related regions of the brain, the dorsal striatum. Revenge, in other words, is primarily about making yourself feel better rather than righting any wrongs. Your act may make you appear moral but it may be more selfish. But revenge for what here? That's where these big narcissistic egos come into play. Psychologically, narcissists are highly sensitive to perceived slights – real or imagined. Musk may have felt Trump was attempting to diminish his achievements for political gain, violating this pact of mutual respect. This kind of sensitivity can quickly transmogrify admiration into contempt. Contempt, coincidentally, is the single best predictor of a breakdown in very close relationships. Disgust and contempt are powerful emotions, evolving to protect us – disgust from physical contamination (spoiled food, disease), and contempt from social or moral contamination (betrayal, incompetence). Both involve rejection – disgust rejects something physically; contempt rejects something socially or morally. Musk may be giving it to Trump with both barrels here. Break-ups are always hard, they get much harder when emotions like these get intertwined with the process. But how will the most powerful man in the world respond to this sort of rejection from the richest man in the world? And where will it end?
