White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has shared new photos from “behind the scenes” before a live interview on Wednesday.
Leavitt, 28, shared the photos on Instagram — taken before she participated in a television interview outside the White House — the same day a Vanity Fair article featuring pictures of members of staff in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration was published.
The Vanity Fair story featured a series of interviews with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who described Trump as someone with “an alcoholic’s personality” and U.S. Vice-President JD Vance as a “conspiracy theorist.”
Leavitt was described as the Trump administration’s “mouthpiece” by Vanity Fair, which also published an up-close photograph of the press secretary that appeared to show marks consistent with lip filler injections. Many people online commented on the outlet’s Instagram post, pointing out the noticeable marks on Leavitt’s upper lip.
Christopher Anderson, the photographer who shot the series of portraits for Vanity Fair, defended his close-up style in an interview with Newsweek.
“Style is for others to judge. My objective, when photographing the political world, is to make photographs that cut through the staged-managed image to reveal something more real and for the images to honestly portray the encounter that I had at the moment,” Anderson said. “Being very close is part of how I have been doing this for many years.”
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He also said he chooses not to “retouch blemishes, injection marks, wrinkles, etc.”
“From my perspective, it should be shocking if I did indeed retouch these things out,” he added.
Wiles pushed back after the piece’s publication, describing it as a “hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.” Leavitt said the “entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
After Leavitt’s television interview on Wednesday, she spoke to reporters briefly about the Vanity Fair article.
“This is unfortunately another example of disingenuous reporting where you have a reporter who took the chief of staff’s words wildly out of context, did not include the context those conversations were had within,” Leavitt said.
“Further, the most egregious part of this article was the bias of omission that was clearly present. And we see a lot of this when dealing with the media every day.
“You will leave out important context, leave out comments and facts. You know, many people in this building spoke with that reporter and those comments were never included in the story, probably because it didn’t push this false narrative of chaos and confusion that the reporter was clearly trying to push.”
Leavitt called Wiles “incredible” and said Trump has been able to “accomplish so much because of his leadership and his tenacity, but also because of Chief of Staff Wiles’ leadership in her ability to effectuate his agenda.”
Trump, in an interview with the New York Post, said he was not offended by Wiles’ remarks, including her description of him as someone with “an alcoholic’s personality” that she recognizes from her father, the famous sports broadcaster Pat Summerall.
The president said: “I’ve said that many times about myself. I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that — what’s the word? Not possessive — possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before.”
Vance, speaking in Pennsylvania on Tuesday about the president’s economic agenda, said he hadn’t read the Vanity Fair piece. But he defended Wiles and joked, “I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.”
“Susie Wiles, we have our disagreements. We agree on much more than we disagree, but I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States, and that makes her the best White House chief of staff that I think the president could ask for,” Vance said.
He said his takeaway was that the administration “should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets.”
— With files from The Associated Press
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