Trump, the village braggart

By Tim Smith-Laing

As he and Kim Jong-Un sat down to lunch at the Singapore summit, Donald Trump turned to the photographers and asked, “Getting a good picture, everybody? So we look nice and handsome and thin?” It is enough, for one brief moment, to make you credit the man with self-awareness. Is it possible that Trump knows there is no way anyone could make him look any of those things? He must, you think, to ask as much. But still, you wish one photographer, just one, could have shouted back, “Only with the lens-cap on.”

It is an odd irony that the so-called TV president, perhaps the world’s most-photographed man, should have a face so resolutely antipathetic to the camera eye. Consider the official presidential portrait shot by Shealah Craighead, whose lens has managed in the past to confer a semblance of humanity upon such unlikely objects as Sarah Palin and Marco Rubio. For something that is, in however gentle a fashion, meant to be propaganda, her portrait of Trump is remarkably unsuccessful. It is not that the 45th president of America is inertly ugly exactly – though it would be an abuse of the bond between language and reality to call him handsome. It is more that he is what you might call “exotically stolid”. He has the physiognomy of one of Bruegel’s Flemish peasants: Drumpf the village braggart, smiling with intense sly pride about some tiny act of cunning, oblivious to the possibility of a damning gaze equipped with full knowledge of his schemes.