Vogue attacked the official White House Christmas portrait in an anonymous article published Tuesday, calling the festive photo of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump “strangely off.”
Here’s the portrait, as originally shared by Melania Trump on Tuesday morning. (RELATED: White House Releases Official Christmas Portrait Of Trump And Melania)
Within hours, Vogue had published an authorless article titled, “What’s Up With This Year’s Surreal White House Christmas Portrait?”
In the first paragraph alone, the anonymous scribe claimed
- the president and first lady “looked like cardboard cutout versions of themselves;
- “they are very, very smiley—despite this season of indictments”;
- the fact that they were holding hands was “a move that is famously out of character for them.”
With regard to the hand-holding, the article appeared to reference times when the first lady appeared to rebuff the president’s attempts to hold her hand. But a quick fact-check revealed that the “move” is anything but “out of character.”
Here are just a few of the times cameras caught up to the president and first lady holding hands — in the last month alone.
US President Donald Trump (C) calls her daughter White House adviser Ivanka Trump to join her wife US First Lady Melania Trump (3-L), Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri (2-L) and his wife Argentina’s First Lady Juliana Awada (L), prior to a gala at the Colon Theater in Buenos Aires, on November 30, 2018 in the sidelines of the G20 Leader’s Summit. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – NOVEMBER 29: U.S. President Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump descend from the Air Force One on their arrival to Buenos Aires for G20 Leaders’ Summit 2018. Amilcar Orfali/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 03: U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to pay their respects as former U.S. President George H.W. Bush lies in state December 03, 2018 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 6: (AFP-OUT) President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive at a Hanukkah reception in the East Room of the White House on December 6, 2018 in Washington, DC. Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images
The article went on to criticize the Trumps for taking the photo without Son Barron and suggested that it was taken in Cross Hall rather than in front of the now infamous red Christmas trees “perhaps because of the immediate online comparisons between them and the dresses in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale'”?
Others speculated that the “surreal” quality was the result of a bad photoshop job, done either to blur out the background to make the subjects stand out or to hide the fact that it wasn’t a real photo at all and they had been superimposed over the background.
Media Research Center vice president Dan Gainor called the anonymous hatchet job a “garbage story,” telling Fox News, “Notice how no one at Vogue was brave enough to put their name on this utter piece of garbage? This isn’t journalism; it’s crap. It belongs in the same sewer that Vogue inhabits.”
