Trump's New White House Portrait Fails To Hide His Biggest Insecurities

Donald Trump has taken to redecorating the White House more to his liking (and proving money can't buy taste along the way). The Oval Office has been blinged out with plenty of gold, and Trump hung a copy of his mugshot outside the Oval Office door. The latest addition seems to be yet another portrait of Trump. While this one doesn't feature Trump's face festooned with an American flag like the one he had placed between portraits of first ladies Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, it manages to highlight what would appear to be Trump's biggest insecurities in how hard the portrait seems to try and hide them.

The new photo was posted on the official White House Instagram page with an all-caps caption that read, "New official presidential portrait of Donald J. Trump just dropped." This new picture has a similar look to Trump's official inauguration portrait, complete with scowl, though this one features Trump wearing a red tie, a big part of his signature look. It also seems to give him a surprisingly full head of hair, especially considering how recent photos of Trump have shown him leaning towards a much thinner look, hair-wise. Trump has long seemed protective about his hair; his complaints about shower head regulations aimed at helping curb energy use have seemed to focus on how he needs more pressure to do his hair.

The new photo, compared to his inauguration day portrait, also has his chin more in shadow, which makes him look slimmer. The photo is a stark contrast to his first term official portrait; that one featured him smiling, and it didn't seem to have the same noticeable contouring on his cheekbones that this one has.

This new White House portrait of Donald Trump (perhaps inadvertently) features another part of his signature look: a bronzed, tan face. Even though the lighting is relatively flattering to his skin tone (not all light is), there's just no hiding the white borders around Trump's eyes in contrast with his bronzed cheeks. And his ears are in shadow; it's often around the ears that you can see the line between Trump's makeup-ed and un-makeup-ed face, so this seems intentional. We've seen Trump makeup-free, and this isn't it. It's also managed to tone down the more orange hue that we're used to seeing when it comes to Trump's face.

Trump has complained about certain lighting making him look bad in the past. At an event in 2019, he said that a fault with energy-efficient lighting involved making him look orange. Then in 2024, he said that Melania has commented on how he doesn't look good on TV under too much light. So this darker lighting seems to play to that particular vanity.

Some Trump fans online have celebrated the portrait. One person posted on X (formerly known as Twitter), "Official and iconic. fits the moment perfectly." But not everyone liked it. One critic on X quipped, "Could you not have chosen a better fitting wig?" And another referred to the image by saying, "The coloring is wrong, and someone told the ferret to lay on the wrong spot on his head."