Trump flashes big grin in new presidential portrait


The White House released official portraits of President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday, presenting the world with two flag-laden photos of both men grinning broadly.
For Trump, the big smile is a change from his normal photo preferences, which reportedly identify sternness with toughness. "As a presidential candidate, he wanted to look dour, and vetoed any campaign imagery that so much as hinted at weakness," aides told The New York Times in a story earlier this year.
Trump's ideal photo is one in which he looks like Winston Churchill, the Times story said. If that was the goal in this portrait, it missed the mark: Churchill's portraits typically saw him scowling at the camera.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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