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Formal and casual White House photos show distance between Trump and increasingly diverse nation
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/trump-white-house-photos-lack-racial-diversity/?utm_term=.7f353fbe2862
In picture after picture, emanating from the most exclusive corridors of American political power, Trump is seen with a team of aides and advisers that is almost exclusively white.
It is a triumphant image: President Trump, smiling and giving a thumbs-up to the camera, flanked backstage at a MAGA rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., by a team of confidants: oldest son Donald Jr., former campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, and Fox News host Pete Hegseth, once considered for a Cabinet post.
The president’s surrogates promptly posted the photo on Twitter last week — an emblem of nostalgia for Trump’s 2016 election and a projection of confidence ahead of 2020.
Yet the image also symbolized a subtext of the Trump presidency: In picture after picture, emanating from the most exclusive corridors of American political power, Trump is seen with a team of aides and advisers that is almost exclusively white — a vivid, if unspoken, statement of the distance between the president and wide swaths of a nation that is growing increasingly and rapidly more diverse.
To a degree, the photos are simply a reflection of what is already well known: Trump lacks racial diversity among his senior staff and Cabinet. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has been the only African American in the top ranks of the administration since the departure in December 2017 of White House senior adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former reality television star.
In picture after picture, emanating from the most exclusive corridors of American political power, Trump is seen with a team of aides and advisers that is almost exclusively white.
It is a triumphant image: President Trump, smiling and giving a thumbs-up to the camera, flanked backstage at a MAGA rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., by a team of confidants: oldest son Donald Jr., former campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, and Fox News host Pete Hegseth, once considered for a Cabinet post.
The president’s surrogates promptly posted the photo on Twitter last week — an emblem of nostalgia for Trump’s 2016 election and a projection of confidence ahead of 2020.
Yet the image also symbolized a subtext of the Trump presidency: In picture after picture, emanating from the most exclusive corridors of American political power, Trump is seen with a team of aides and advisers that is almost exclusively white — a vivid, if unspoken, statement of the distance between the president and wide swaths of a nation that is growing increasingly and rapidly more diverse.
To a degree, the photos are simply a reflection of what is already well known: Trump lacks racial diversity among his senior staff and Cabinet. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has been the only African American in the top ranks of the administration since the departure in December 2017 of White House senior adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former reality television star.
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Out loud. Very loudly!
