What to Know
People can’t stop talking about Vanity Fair’s bombshell White House profile — especially the close-up portraits that accompany the feature. After seeing the photos, some were convinced that the photographer was purposely trying to make Trump admin officials look bad. One of the photos that has garnered a lot of attention is the close-up of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, as many people have commented on how the photo seemed to show injection sites on her lips.
Those who saw the close-up while scrolling on social media were kind of horrified. “jump scare,” one person commented on the close-up. Another person who reacted to it on Instagram wrote, “How has IG not blurred this with a sensitive content warning yet.”
People have made a lot of comments about Karoline’s apparent lip filler and her age.
A lot of the people who reacted to Karoline’s close-up focused on how she’s only 28 years old. “Oof, that’s a rough 28,” one person on Reddit wrote. “Look at all the lip injection marks. Love that for her.” Some assumed that Karoline has aged due to “hate” or being a Republican. “republican 28 is ROUGH,” one person commented on Instagram. Someone else wrote, “That is a HARD 28 yall. Like the say though, hate and racism will rot ya from the inside out! 🙃”
Jokingly, others suggested that Karoline is actually “28 in dog years.”
Though many people loved the photos because of how the Trump administration was portrayed in them, they assumed that those who were involved in the feature purposely tried to make them look bad. Social media users guessed that it was a team effort involving people who clearly “hate” Karoline. “The number of people who had to hate her to make this happen – the photographer, photo editor, makeup artist, the person doing layout, etc” one person theorized. Someone else said, “that makeup artist HATED her. not only did they not cover up her lip filler marks, they highlighted them.”
As another person put it, “they did her diiiiirty with this one. Those are literally fresh injection marks on her upper lip….”
While the majority of people agreed that the whole thing seemed “petty,” many who are critical of the Trump administration loved it. Others — presumably those who support President Donald Trump — did not share those feelings. “Doing photos like this makes it look like a political hit piece,” one critic commented.
The photographer defended the photos.
After the photos went viral, photographer Christopher Anderson told The Independent that he was not actually trying to make Karoline and other Trump admin officials look bad. This is just his style, he said. “Very close-up portraiture has been a fixture in a lot of my work over the years,” he told the publication. “Particularly, political portraits that I’ve done over the years. I like the idea of penetrating the theater of politics.”
He knows what people are saying about the photos — that he wanted to make the Trump administration look bad on purpose. But according to him, “that’s not the case.”
The photographer added, “If you look at my photograph work, I’ve done a lot of close-ups in the same style with people of all political stripes.”
