The administration’s latest and most damaging attack on journalists—the banning of CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from covering the White House, followed by a boycott of White House audio and video by major news orgs—sent me back to this image from a July photo essay by Kent Nishimura for The New Yorker that depicted the White House Press Corps.
The nuts-and-bolts photo story focused on backstage scenes of journalists covering the administration. But this candid photo of Kaitlan Collins—a persistent target of Trump’s vitriol and attempts at humiliation, standard operating procedure in an Oval Office turned Demon’s Lair—says a lot about how Trump has marginalized the press and eroded the legitimacy of White House reporting.
It’s not just the frankness of Collins’s gaze, a familiar gesture, as if someone were sweeping their hair aside while stealing a glance over the shoulder. The look is directed at Brian Glenn, the former correspondent for Real America’s Voice. Glenn’s presence in the photograph is significant. RAV is an explicitly pro-Trump outlet, and Glenn is married to former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The scene is not merely fodder for the current upheaval; it suggests the kind of tension mainstream journalists endure being vilified by Trump as “enemies of the state” while working in boiler-room conditions alongside openly partisan figures.
The photo's trappings could not be more mundane. It offers no hint of the media theatrics, vengeance, or misogyny for which Trump is notorious. Instead, it unfolds amid a crush of equipment, bodies, cables, and ladders, as press members endure endless periods of waiting.
Even the ladders evoke division. One presents like a barricade in front of Glenn; another literally cuts the photo in two, also compressing Collins as the tilt aligns with her back and head.
Glenn’s depiction is also telling. Larger in the foreground but softly out of focus, he appears almost floaty, a disembodied talking head working at the margin. Captured in the more formal black-and-white, the fuzzy head becomes another testament to the surreal.
Now that the tenuous balance between Trump and the White House press corps has fully broken down, the photo seems even more prescient in capturing the fissures before the explosion. The lasting question is not what Collins privately thought in that instant, but how much the photo frames the final, barely tolerable stage of the relationship between the administration and an independent press.
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They’re friends. Do we forget so quickly forget that Collins worked for multiple right wing “news” outlets before she got her comfy gig at CNN?