New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd says that one candid photo sums up President Donald Trump’s presidency right now.
Doug Mills, the Times’ White House photographer, took the picture Tuesday aboard Marine One. Trump leans in to talk with Katie Zacharia, who was then his new press secretary, and Natalie Harp, the aide known for following him around with a portable printer.
“It is a snapshot of Trump’s hunger for adulation that has dragged us to this fraught moment in America,” Dowd wrote in her Saturday column.
She said the open helicopter doors, with Marines at attention on either side, make it look like viewers are “peering inside a bubble.” That’s happening, she wrote, “at the very moment that Trump’s White House bubble is getting smaller and more ingrown and fractious than ever.”
Dowd called Zacharia “the inept propagandist.” She said both women help Trump “construct and perpetuate his absurd alternative reality and paranoid worldview.”
The photo didn’t age well. By Friday, Trump had pushed Zacharia out after five days on the job. Her first briefing went badly, and then it came out that she had never passed the bar despite calling herself a lawyer. When Times reporter Shawn McCreesh asked where she passed the bar, Zacharia answered, “When I moved to China.” Dowd said Trump “snapped his head around.”
Things got worse on Fox News. Sean Hannity asked her why she’d identified herself as an attorney in 15 posts.
Dowd also pointed to someone barely in the frame: White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Only her legs, in red pants, and a Louis Vuitton bag on her lap are visible.
“Tellingly and perhaps prophetically, Susie Wiles is in Mills’s picture, but mostly cut out of the frame,” Dowd wrote. She noted that Politico Playbook reported this week that Trump is shopping for a new chief of staff.
Dowd said the photo captures a White House that’s coming apart as the midterms near.
“As his hold on the country seems to be slipping through his pudgy fingers, Trump needs the unqualified love from his blond Praetorian Guard,” she wrote.
She said the president’s “inner circle is going up in flames,” with aides “turning on one another and sinking in a cauldron of corruption and boneheaded policies.”
“Instead of running the country and dealing with the world he has set on fire,” Dowd wrote, “the president is focused on settling petty squabbles and a web of corruption in his incompetent — and dangerous — court.”