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    ‘There are images no leader ever wants to be seen’: 33 pivotal US presidential moments captured on camera

    Is it any surprise that “photo op” is a phrase imported into British English from the United States? Of course it came from there, the land where the visual image sits right at the centre of the culture, with politics no exception. It was the Nixon White House that came up with it, specifically a press aide by the name of Bruce Whelihan. According to Washington legend, whenever the president was meeting a visiting dignitary, Richard Nixon’s hardball press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would turn to his underling with an order to summon the snappers. “Get ’em in for a picture,” Ziegler would say. Too polite to put it that way himself, Whelihan would clear his throat and announce to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington press corps: “There will be a photo opportunity in the Oval Office.” The photo op was born.But if the term was new, the thing itself had been a part of US politics almost from the start. Just as Roman emperors sought to cast themselves in stone and Tudor kings commissioned the finest artists to capture their likeness, so American presidents moved fast to harness the new technology of the age, in order that the nation might see the men who governed them. The selection of photographs assembled here is made up of a series of striking images, but a couple are extraordinary less for what they show than for the fact that they exist at all.Behold a portrait of John Quincy Adams, sixth US president and the son of its second. A daguerreotype, it dates to March 1843), when Adams had been out of office for well over a decade, but still: it is the earliest known photograph of a US president, its subject a man born in 1767 and whose father was the successor to George Washington himself. Seeing the face of Abraham Lincoln induces a similar feeling of historical vertigo. If there’s a tendency to divide human events into two broad categories – our own, modern era and everything that went before – then the invention of the photograph can often be the instinctive dividing line between the two. But here are Adams and Lincoln, jumping over the barrier and barging their way into our own times.As for Nixon himself, he appears in this collection twice. That’s fitting, and not only because of the origin story of the photo op. Nixon learned the hard way that in modern American politics, image is everything. Washington legend holds that in their 1960 presidential debate, Nixon comfortably beat the young Massachusetts senator John F Kennedy among voters who followed the contest on the radio – but, his face darkened by five o’clock shadow, he lost among those who watched on TV. After that, Nixon was ready to put himself in the hands of the image-makers.One result is the intriguing photograph of the president and the king, Nixon and Elvis, standing improbably together in the White House in 1970. Showing two men both then at the height of their powers, both to fall just a few years later, the picture was long the most requested of all those held by the US National Archives). It fascinates partly because the pair represent polar opposites – a rock legend and a man so uncool he wore a suit on the beach) – and partly because it invites you to guess at the men’s motives: Nixon surely wanted some of Presley’s stardust to land on him, while Elvis was in search of a federal agent’s badge and, it seems, a sense of purpose.The other Nixon shot is the one that etched his downfall into the public imagination. It shows his parting gesture – an oddly celebratory, double V-for-victory salute – from the presidential helicopter as he made his disgraced exit following the Watergate scandal). Nixon flew off to California and into the history books as the first US president ever to quit.Between them, Elvis and Watergate, those pictures represent the two categories of presidential photograph: the ones they wanted – the photo ops – and the ones they most emphatically did not. The first category brims with examples and they follow a pattern. They show the occupant of the White House as a heroic, even mythic figure. The exemplar is Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, a hunter and adventurer who engaged in photogenic displays of muscularity and machismo so overt, they’d make Vladimir Putin blush. But that tradition has endured. Indeed, it has turned into an expectation that a US president must not only be competent and wise, but also fit, strong and marked by conspicuous physical courage.Meeting that demand has been easy for some occupants of America’s highest office. Dwight Eisenhower didn’t have to pretend to be a warrior: he had been the supreme allied commander during the second world war. When he first campaigned for the presidency in 1952, there was no need to stage a photo op: there were images aplenty of him directing the D-day mission) that had turned the war around just eight years earlier. No wonder he won.But for others, producing images of strength and command has taken some doing. The group portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta ) had to have the so-called the Big Three seated because Roosevelt was paralysed from the waist down and required either a wheelchair or leg braces to get around. He and his aides went to great lengths to keep that fact from the US public and they mostly succeeded, thanks to a compliant press pack who obediently put away their cameras once the chosen image had been secured.That remained the custom for a while, the snappers keeping a discreet distance even after Eisenhower had both a heart attack and stroke in office, and as Kennedy battled crippling back pain. The images told a different story, including the silhouetted portrait of JFK standing alone at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, head bowed, a study in the loneliness of ultimate political authority). That photograph may lack the glamour or sparkle of other Camelot-era pictures, but it contributed to the Kennedy mystique – and the mythology of the presidency itself – every bit as much. This was the era of the cold war, of a nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR, and that desk was where the buck stopped. Here was where the button would be pressed – and here was the man who would press it.Naturally, this iconography of president-as-hero takes different forms, depending on who’s in the job. The image Jimmy Carter treasured from his single term in office cast him as successful peacemaker, bringing together Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the Camp David peace accords. For supporters of Donald Trump, the picture that renders him a hero is the one taken a second after a would-be assassin’s bullet had brushed his ear, when he raised his fistand, with bloodied face, urged them to “Fight, fight, fight!”.Sometimes, though, the man at the top has struggled to meet that deep public need for an alpha figure in the White House. Carter’s political prospects took a hit when he was photographed “wobbling, moaning and pale with exhaustion” during a six-mile run in 1979). But the most recent, and serious, example is Joe Biden, whose visible frailty drove him from this year’s presidential race. The pictures showing him apparently slack-jawed during a June TV debate with Trump were enough to persuade Democrats that he had to go.Which brings us to the images no leader ever wanted to be seen. Some were photo ops whose aim was to offer a heroic, presidential figure, which went badly wrong. Michael Dukakis’s handlers wanted to project him as a potential commander-in-chief when they put him in a tank during the 1988 campaign); instead he looked like a hopeless dweeb. George W Bush’s team doubtless thought a Mission Accomplished banner on an aircraft carrier conveyed victorious strength following the invasion of Iraq; instead it came to haunt him as an emblem of hubris and myopia.But other unwanted images from this collection capture not mistaken bits of stage management, but rather tragedy and disaster. George W Bush reading My Pet Goat to a group of Florida schoolkids as he gets word of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 distils the shock of 9/11, even now. The lifeless body of Robert F Kennedy evokes the turbulence and violence of 1968), a time when the US seemed about to tear itself apart.It’s all here: moments of hope – Barack Obama inspiring a young boy as America’s first Black president – and moments of despair – Lyndon Johnson taking the oath following JFK’s assassination while Jackie Kennedy, in blood-stained clothes, looks on. And yet, no matter how sweeping the range of these photographs, there is something missing from this selection. It would be lacking in any assembly of presidential pictures. Yes, there are Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. Yes, there are old presidents and young presidents. But there is no female president. We see Hillary Clinton, who got close. We see Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black woman to try but never got near. Otherwise, there is an absence. On 5 November, Americans have a chance to fill that space – and to give the world a picture no one has ever seen before.Picture captions by Felix Bazalgette and Gabrielle SchwarzJimmy Carter collapses, 1979By Phil StewartView image in fullscreen“His face was ashen and his mouth hung open,” is how one reporter described Jimmy Carter in September 1979, when the president dropped out of a six-mile race four miles in. Though he swiftly recovered, this image – two months after his speech blaming US problems on a “crisis of confidence” – was seen as evidence of weakness. He lost to Ronald Reagan the following year. GSRichard Nixon bids goodbye, 1974Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“Once more, there was not a spark of contrition in the man,” commented the Guardian at the time. On 8 August 1974, Richard Nixon earned the dubious honour of being the first (and, to this day, only) president to resign from office.Two years earlier, five men were caught trying to burgle and bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC. The subsequent investigation implicated Nixon, who faced impeachment for his role in covering up the break-in. Yet – as seen in this image of him leaving the White House for the last time – he was never really repentant. As he told David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” One month after he resigned, his chosen successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. GSFDR at Yalta, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenFor eight days in February 1945, the “Big Three” – Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin – met in the Crimean city of Yalta to discuss allied strategy.“FDR’s position between the other leaders is significant,” Diana Preston, historian and author of Eight Days at Yalta. “It was appropriate for a man who hoped to reconcile conflicting interests and build a future peace.” The conference was at first deemed a success, but the Soviet leader soon broke his promises to allow free elections in eastern Europe, and the cold war began. GSTexts from Hillary Clinton, 2011By Kevin LamarqueView image in fullscreenIt was the photograph that launched a thousand memes before becoming a liability at election time. The image of Hillary Clinton texting in sunglasses aboard a military plane to Libya went viral, inspiring a popular blog called “Texts from Hillary”. CBS reported at the time: “Hillary Clinton brings the LOLZ” and Clinton even name-checked the authors of the blog in her first ever tweet, proudly setting the image as her avatar.By 2015, however, she would distance herself from it, dropping it from her Twitter profile when the FBI announced an investigation into her use of a private email address for government business. As the image became used in articles about the investigation, its meaning began to shift. Many people started to wonder what Clinton might have been writing on that Blackberry. The scandal came to a catastrophic peak just 11 days before the 2016 election, when FBI director James Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation after having closed it in July. FBTheodore Roosevelt, 1898Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of Roosevelt on a horse encapsulates the rugged masculinity the 26th president – in fact born into an aristocratic family in New York – strove to embody. Once a sickly child, he credited his recovery to exertion and hardship, and argued this approach would lead to triumph for both man and nation. Here he is in Cuba during the Spanish-American war, leading volunteer regiment the Rough Riders. Returning a war hero, he re-entered politics and became president after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. GSHair Like Mine, 2009By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreenThe symbolic power of the first African American president was cemented in this image of Barack Obama leaning forward so a five-year-old boy could feel his hair. On 8 May 2009, Jacob’s dad, departing national security council staffer Carlton Philadelphia, took his family to the Oval Office for a farewell photo. This snap, by the then chief White House photographer Pete Souza, captures the moment Jacob asked, “Is your hair like mine?” Obama suggested he touch it and see. A framed print of the photo was hung in the White House for the rest of his presidency.“The whole thing happened so fast, I literally have this one picture,” Souza recalls. “My composition was not perfect, but I think it adds to the spontaneity of the moment.”Two years ago, Obama called Jacob to congratulate him on his high-school graduation. “Folks who maybe didn’t feel they belonged,” he said of the image, “they’d look at themselves differently – to see a person who looked like them in the Oval Office.”“That was a highlight of my life,” Jacob said. “If I get to see another Black man at the top, I want to follow that lead.” GSAssassination attempt on Donald Trump, 2024By Evan VucciView image in fullscreenThis photograph will be remembered as a pivotal moment in this year’s election. On 13 July, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler County in Pennsylvania. The former president was only lightly wounded when a bullet grazed his right ear but one crowd member was killed and another two critically injured before the shooter was taken down by a Secret Service sniper. This remarkable image of Trump – his ear and face bloodied, and fist defiantly raised in the air as he is hurried off the stage, an American flag raised behind him – instantly went viral. In an interview soon after, AP photojournalist Evan Vucci recalled his thoughts as he was capturing the scene: “In my head, I just kept saying to myself, slow down, slow down. Compose, compose.” GSAbraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863By Mathew B BradyView image in fullscreenFor almost a century, it was thought that no photographs existed of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg on 19 November, the day he delivered his endlessly quoted address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. That is, until archivist Josephine Cobb undertook some detective work in 1952. Cobb, the first woman to be employed by the National Archives, picked through the work of the 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady, famous for his portraits of the great and good. She came upon a broken glass negative that showed a vast crowd at Gettysburg – she estimated the time to be about noon, a few hours before Lincoln would speak. After repeatedly enlarging, expanding and reprinting the image, she found his unmistakable face in the crowd (bare-headed, left of centre). FBRonald and Nancy Reagan kissing in Vanity Fair, 1985 By Harry Benson View image in fullscreen“There is in the West,” wrote William F Buckley in 1985, “a tradition against chiefs of state engaging in visible, let alone ostentatious, shows of biological informality.” Ronald and Nancy Reagan, both successful actors before going into politics, bucked tradition by using the White House as a setting for their love story. The media was happy to indulge them, with Buckley writing a fawning ode to the couple in Vanity Fair, to accompany a series of images by Harry Benson of them dancing to Sinatra and locking lips.Reagan, a year into his final term, could risk a little biological informality – the images were probably more consequential for Vanity Fair. Benson later said that the loss-making publication was facing closure until this issue. The editor Tina Brown, he said, convinced the owner to “wait until the June 1985 cover of the Reagans appeared. The magazine sold off the stands and the magazine was saved.” FBRichard Nixon with Elvis Presley, 1970By Oliver F AtkinsView image in fullscreenOne December morning in 1970, Elvis showed up at the White House with a handwritten letter for the president. He wanted to give him a gift (a Colt pistol with silver bullets) and discuss becoming a “federal agent at large”: “I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and communist brainwashing and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can do the most good,” he wrote.Nixon gave Presley a federal narcotics badge, but not an official role. The bizarre encounter was captured by White House photographer Oliver F Atkins, but the images weren’t made public until the 1980s, after Nixon’s resignation and Presley’s death. GSJohn F Kennedy: the loneliest job, 1961By George TamesView image in fullscreenA few weeks into his presidency, JFK stood at his desk before meeting the French ambassador, reading an official paper. Photographer George Tames, shadowing him for the New York Times, took this photograph, which became famous for its intimate portrayal of the pressures of holding office.It was later reproduced in the opening title of US political drama The West Wing. FBBill Clinton hugs Monica Lewinsky, 1996By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenIt was a moment captured by chance: a hug between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the crowd at a Democratic fundraiser in Washington in October 1996. But when news of the affair between the president and the former White House intern broke in 1998, photojournalist Dirck Halstead, then senior White House photographer at Time magazine, recognised her face. After searching through his archives, he located this image in a box of transparencies. The photo ran on Time’s cover that August, when Lewinsky agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating Clinton’s denials of the affair.Four months later, Clinton was impeached on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury, but he was eventually acquitted and left office after two terms in 2001 with the highest approval rating of any departing postwar president. Lewinsky, meanwhile, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracised back then”, the anti-bullying campaigner wrote in Vanity Fair in 2018. “There has been at least one significant reference in the press to that unfortunate spell in our history every day for the past 20 years.” GS‘Dewey defeats Truman’, 1948Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWith Harry Truman’s popularity waning, a win for his Republican opponent, Thomas E Dewey, in the 1948 election seemed certain. The Chicago Daily Tribune, forced to go to press early due to a printers’ strike, issued 150,000 copies of this 3 November edition – held up by a gleeful Truman en route to Washington – before it became clear its editors had backed the wrong horse. GSDwight D Eisenhower, 1944Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of General Dwight D Eisenhower addressing paratroopers at Greenham Common airfield on 5 June 1944, the day before they would parachute into France, became one of the most widely circulated of the war, durably linking him with D-day’s success and the eventual American victory. Despite the general’s authoritative pose, the soldier closest to him, Lieutenant Wallace Strobel, recalled a lighter conversation. “He asked my name and which state I was from … He then said, ‘Oh yes, Michigan, great fishing there. Been there several times and like it.’”After the war “Ike”, as he was popularly known, regularly topped polls as America’s most admired man. After years of claiming that it would be inappropriate for a military leader to run for president, he finally went for it in 1952, winning 55% of the popular vote for the Republicans. FBHarry S Truman and Lauren Bacall on the piano, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWhile playing piano for photographers during a wartime variety show in 1945, vice-president Truman was joined by 20-year-old Lauren Bacall, with the famous actor perched awkwardly above him. “I was just a kid,” shrugged Bacall years later. “My press agent made me do it.”Truman had only been vice-president for a few weeks, plucked from relative obscurity by Franklin D Roosevelt. This photograph, considered risque at the time, made headlines all around the world and helped to establish his public image – even if they irritated his inner circle, including his wife, Bess. “I don’t think you should play piano in public again,” she said, according to Truman’s grandson. The New York Times recently dubbed it a viral image before its time – it inspired so many other women to climb up on the piano that it eventually broke. FBShirley Chisholm’s presidential bid, 1972By Don Hogan CharlesView image in fullscreenThis is Shirley Chisholm – who four years earlier had become the first Black woman elected to Congress – announcing her presidential bid at the Concord Baptist Church, Brooklyn. She knew that, with its “Unbought and Unbossed” slogan, the campaign was a long shot – she was also the first woman of colour from either major party to run for president. So it was a feat that, despite racism and sexism from her own party as well as the opposition, she made it to the Democratic national convention with the support of 152 delegates – and came fourth. When Kamala Harris launched her first presidential bid in 2020, she paid tribute with campaign colours based on the red and yellow pins Chisholm’s supporters wore. GSGeorge W Bush’s Mission Accomplished moment, 2003By Stephen JaffeView image in fullscreenDan Bartlett, George Bush’s communications director at the time, would later call this photo op “one of the big regrets of my life”. “It did seem premature,” remembers Stephen Jaffe, the press corp photographer covering Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier that day. “The administration tried to stage everything perfectly – unfortunately it’s not a perfect world.”As the eight-year occupation of Iraq spiralled and weapons of mass destruction failed to appear, the image of Bush in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, just six weeks into an invasion that would kill more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians, became a symbol of hubris.While Bartlett says the banner referred to the mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln, returning from its tour in the Gulf – the ship’s crew requested it, and he “didn’t think twice”– Jaffe is sceptical and thinks the intended meaning was plain to all on the day. “There was a lot of spin afterwards,” he says. “If the mission had been accomplished, they would have taken credit for it.” FBGeorge W Bush learns of 9/11, 2001By Win McNameeView image in fullscreenThis captures the moment on the morning of 11 September 2001 when George Bush, taking part in a reading session at a primary school in Florida, learned that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. (He’d been informed of the first plane, at the time thought to be an accident, before he entered the classroom.) When his chief of staff, Andy Card, whispered in his ear, “America is under attack,” he decided not to interrupt the reading, instead waiting around seven minutes before leaving.It would become one of the most scrutinised events of his presidency. In his scathing 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore said, “Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr Bush just sat there.” But several people there that day have since spoken out in his defence. “It was nice he understood we were young kids and would probably have gone crazy if he had told us what had happened,” former student La’Damien Smith told an interviewer in 2011. GSSituation Room, 2011By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreen“It’s not a picture I have hanging on my wall,” Pete Souza says. “It’s not artistic – the lighting in that room sucked.” On 1 May 2011, the chief White House photographer was called to the situation room, a network of rooms below the White House. The atmosphere immediately felt unusual. “I had been there many, many times before to cover discussions about sensitive policy decisions,” Souza says. On this day, however, the decision had already been made: Souza was there to document Barack Obama and his senior team as they watched the operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden play out in real time.As everyone packed into a side room to watch a live feed from a drone, Souza squeezed himself in the corner. (Seated, from left to right, is then vice-president Biden, Obama, joint operations command Marshall B Webb, deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and secretary of defense Robert Gates.) While the raid unfolded in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Souza took about 100 images. “It was as tense and anxious a situation as I had ever seen that whole team in,” he recalls. “You could see it on their faces.” He tried to focus on his composition, getting everyone in frame, and on timing his shutter clicks so as not to distract them. Later it was announced that Navy Seals had killed Bin Laden, along with his son, a courier and two of the courier’s relatives.Of nine pictures released that day, it was this one that went viral, exhaustively analysed and relentlessly memed. Souza, looking back today, believes this was because it occupied some part of the national psyche: “We had this guy that attacked our country, and it took us 10 years to find him, but we found him. It closed the chapter.” FBJohn Quincy Adams, 1843By Philip HaasView image in fullscreenThough Adams was not the first president to be photographed (an 1841 picture of William Henry Harrison is now lost), this is the oldest surviving portrait of a US president. Adams had a familiarly vexed relationship with the medium. “All hideous,” he wrote in his diary, after posing for daguerreotypes in the early 1840s. “Too true to the original.” This image of Adams – who served as president in the 1820s – surfaced in 2017, found by the great-great-grandson of a congressman who had received it as a gift from Adams. FBMichael Dukakis and the tank, 1988By Michael E SamojedenView image in fullscreenMeant to project strength, this unfortunate photo-call crystallised, for critics and voters, something mediocre and uncertain about the Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. The Republicans used it relentlessly in attack ads.Politicians are drawn to tanks: Churchill, Putin, Blair, Hugo Chavez, Liz Truss and Nigel Farage have all been snapped on or in one. Dukakis’s efforts came only a couple of years after Thatcher’s influential contribution to the genre; while she loomed out of the turret with uncanny poise, dressed in her own clothes, he seemed shrunken and overwhelmed, in a helmet that didn’t belong to him.Widely recognised as one of the most disastrous campaign photos in history, the image would haunt future presidencies. “I sat in countless meetings in which some smartass warned that a stop on the president’s schedule had the makings of a ‘Dukakis in the tank moment,’” recalled former Clinton aide John King to Politico. In 2013, after being handed a naval football helmet, Obama declined to try it on. “You do not put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he joked. FBJFK in the motorcade, 1963Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“It was a watershed moment that changed America,” says Fredrik Logevall, historian and biographer of John F Kennedy. “I think there’s something to the notion that America lost its innocence after 22 November 1963.”More than other images from Kennedy’s assassination – grainy TV coverage of the immediate aftermath, or Lyndon B Johnson being sworn in – this long lens shot of Kennedy smiling just moments before his assassination has come to signify what was lost that day. “In this photograph he’s for ever frozen in our minds,” Logevall says, “the picture of youthful vitality and glamour.”For Logevall, it captures an era not only less haunted by political violence – open-top motorcades, beloved by Kennedy because he could get “closer to the people”, are a thing of the past – but also less riven by polarisation. “This was a conservative city,” he notes, and yet “hundreds of thousands of people turned up to cheer him on”.Kennedy was on his way to deliver a speech on political extremism, with lines Logevall believes to be prescient. “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy, with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” FBLBJ being sworn in, 1963By Cecil W StoughtonView image in fullscreenOn 22 November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F Kennedy, vice-president Lyndon B Johnson took the oath to become the 36th president of the US, inside a cramped compartment aboard Air Force One, on the runway of Dallas airport. Kennedy’s body had been loaded on to the plane 15 minutes before, and as the compartment filled with people, White House photographer Cecil Stoughton stood on top of a sofa, crammed himself against the curved ceiling and asked everyone to step back.When Jackie Kennedy arrived, still in her blood- stained suit, she was positioned to LBJ’s left – her haunting, dazed expression lends the image its emotional force. In less than a minute, as Stoughton snapped eight pictures, the ceremony was over. As Air Force One continued on to Washington, Stoughton left the plane to ensure his film was swiftly developed and transmitted to the world’s press, to authenticate the transfer of power to a new president. FBDonald Trump mugshot, 2023By Fulton County Sheriff’s OfficeView image in fullscreenEven before Trump arrived at the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia, last August, people were anticipating the release of his mugshot, with fakes spreading around the internet. It was his fourth arrest that year, but the first time he had had a picture taken.Mugshots are often used to shame public figures who have run-ins with the law. But for Trump, ever the self-publicist, the image became a golden opportunity, adorning mugs, T-shirts and stickers, with the mottos “Never Surrender” or “Not Guilty”. Trump, not long reinstated on X by Elon Musk, tweeted the image himself, raising more than $7m in just a few days. FBJimmy Carter at Camp David, 1978By Karl SchumacherView image in fullscreenIn September 1978, Jimmy Carter convened a secret 12-day summit with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at Camp David. The main focus was a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel after 30 years of intermittent war. The resulting accords led to Israel agreeing to withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for its first official recognition by an Arab state and an end to the state of war. A plan was also laid out for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza, but it was never implemented.Here Begin and Sadat are shown smiling and shaking hands at the presidential retreat in Maryland, as Carter looks on. “The picture makes it look as if the three leaders all got along very well at the summit. That was not at all the case,” recalls William B Quandt, a former national security council staffer who was involved in the negotiations. “The adversaries were very hostile, and on the third day Carter decided not to have any more three-way meetings. We were not at all sure we would get an agreement until the last day.”Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace prize that year, while Carter was awarded it in 2002 for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts”. While the Camp David accords are recognised as his greatest presidential achievement, they left crucial issues unresolved and, some argue, helped prevent Palestianian statehood. GSGeorge HW Bush in bed, 1987By David ValdezView image in fullscreenThis photograph, taken in 1987 for Life ­magazine, captured the then vice- president with his ­family on holiday in Maine. David Valdez – personal photographer to Bush at the time – was invited by Barbara Bush to come by the house at 6am. “I poked my head in the bedroom door and there were George and Barbara Bush in bed,” he later told NPR. “Then the ­grandchildren started coming in and I took that snap, and that wound up running two full pages, and it’s taken on a life of its own.” The Washington Post credited the image with launching Bush’s successful campaign for the presidency; Valdez became his official White House ­photographer. FBLyndon B Johnson watches war protests, 1968By Yoichi OkamotoView image in fullscreenThis strikingly intimate shot shows LBJ and his family at his ranch in Texas, watching TV coverage of Vietnam war protests outside the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago. This level of access was remarkable: Yoichi Okamoto was the first civilian to be appointed chief photographer for the White House.Here we can also see a turning point in LBJ’s presidency. Since taking over in 1963, he had sent more than 500,000 troops to what the public increasingly saw as an unjustifiable, unwinnable war. “I know we oughtn’t to be there,” Johnson admitted to a colleague in 1966, “but I can’t get out.” He withdrew from the 1968 election, and Nixon won. GSCalvin Coolidge as a cowboy, 1927Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenDuring his tenure in the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge held the greatest number of press conferences of any president (521 over six years), delivered the first State of the Union address on the radio and was the first to appear in a sound film. The media-savvy president appeared in photos dressed up in workers’ overalls, pitching hay and – as here – wearing a cowboy’s chaps and hat, on a trip to South Dakota. This image caused a stir: while the New York Times claimed “Coolidge as Cowboy Wins West’s Heart”, others called him “a pitiful puppet of publicity”, the first president to make himself a laughing stock. He would not be the last. FBBill Clinton on Arsenio Hall, 1992By Reed SaxonView image in fullscreenThis may well be what clinched the 1992 election for Bill Clinton. In June, weeks before accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, he appeared on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talkshow and played Heartbreak Hotel on the saxophone. It was a bold move at the time and the image of a cool, confident Clinton on stage with his sax and dark shades is credited with helping him secure the youth vote especially. “It’s nice to see a Democrat blow something besides the election,” Hall quipped on the show. The success of the appearance, the Los Angeles Times wrote, “changed presidential politics – turning pop culture’s hippest TV shows into the contemporary equivalent of campaign whistle-stops”. GSLyndon B Johnson with Martin Luther King Jr, 1965Photographer unknown View image in fullscreen“I want to tell you how grateful I am,” Johnson told King on the phone, after becoming president in 1963, “and how worthy I’m going to try to be of all your hopes.” The cautious collaboration between the two reached its peak on 6 August 1965, with the signing of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Johnson is pictured that day, reaching out to pass a smiling King the pen used to sign the act, as Rosa Parks looks on.How strong this much mythologised moment of unity really was has remained the subject of fierce debate. Mutual distrust haunted their interactions and King faced relentless pressure from J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, with Johnson’s knowledge. King split with the government over Vietnam, and today, voting rights have been rolled back. FBRonald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, 1987By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenOn 12 June 1987, Ronald Reagan delivered probably the most famous sentence of his presidency: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” He was standing in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, 24 years after JFK gave his famous speech in the city. It was a risky move: the previous day, thousands had gathered to protest against his visit. Even his own advisers had been unsure whether the public address to the Soviet leader was too provocative. But the fall of the Wall two years later, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, seemed to vindicate the decision – though there is debate over whether its importance has been overplayed. Over time, Gorbachev and Reagan, both keen to end the cold war, formed a productive alliance. GSJoe Biden at the debate, 2024By Justin SullivanView image in fullscreen“I’ve done 31 debates since I’ve been at Getty,” says photographer Justin Sullivan, “and I’ve never seen anything like that.” The Biden-Trump debate of June 2024 had felt unusual even before it started: press were allowed in only moments before it began and the room was eerily empty. As a “pale and very unstable” Biden gave “incoherent” answers, Sullivan focused on the “strange facial expressions” that damned him as much as his nonsensical responses did. Within weeks, he’d dropped out of the race.“It was a sad ending to a strong presidency that history will look upon more favourably,” says David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief. “He inherited four major crises – the pandemic, the economy, racial justice and climate – and made significant progress on all of them.” FBRobert F Kennedy’s assassination, 1968By Bill EppridgeView image in fullscreenOn 5 June 1968, Robert F Kennedy was in the ballroom of the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles, giving a victory speech after winning the Democratic California presidential primary – he was shaping up to be the nominee to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. As he exited through the hotel kitchen after midnight, shaking hands with staff, shots rang out. In this photograph by Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge, Kennedy lies on the floor while a busboy, Juan Romero, crouches down to comfort him. Kennedy died the next day. The gunman was Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man who said he felt betrayed by Kennedy’s support for Israel in the six-day war.Letters addressed to “the busboy” soon arrived at the hotel. “One even went so far as to say that if he hadn’t stopped to shake my hand, the senator would be alive, so I should be ashamed of myself for being so selfish,” Romero told NPR in 2018. “It’s been a long 50 years.” He visited Kennedy’s grave in 2010, buying his first suit for the occasion.Alternative accounts of the assassination have since emerged. His son, Robert F Kennedy Jr – a conspiracy theorist who recently suspended his own presidential campaign – is among those who believe there was a second gunman. GS More

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    Donald Trump repeats anti-immigrant threads at Milwaukee rally

    At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”Drawing applause and chants of “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby”, Kennedy addressed the crowd, reminding them that although he has left the race, he will still appear on the ballot and urging them to vote for Trump. “I said a prayer to God that he would put me in a position to end the chronic disease epidemic,” said Kennedy. “God sent me Donald J Trump.”During his remarks, the Republican congressman Bryan Steil urged the audience to support a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in Wisconsin that would ban non-US citizens from voting in Wisconsin elections – a proposal that seeks to pre-empt municipalities from opening their local elections to non-citizens and comes as Republicans elevate unfounded anxieties about non-US citizens committing voter fraud in federal elections.“We have an opportunity on Tuesday to vote ‘yes’ on an amendment to say that Wisconsin’s elections and American’s elections are for US citizens only, do you agree?” said Steil. The idea that immigrants threaten US elections has caught fire among Trump’s supporters.Jason Tyler, a Republican activist who attended the Milwaukee rally, said he was worried about non-citizens voting illegally in the presidential election. Tyler plans to volunteer as a poll observer in Rock county on election day, where he said he will be looking for non-US citizens casting ballots. “My biggest thing I would be looking for is if somebody can’t speak English and start there,” said Tyler, who acknowledged that the bar for challenging a ballot is high enough in Wisconsin that he would not likely succeed in preventing a voter from casting a ballot.“It’s very difficult – the only thing that I can really do is I can ask for their information, you know, find out who they are, and I can report that, if I felt that there was something weird about it,” said Tyler. “I can’t really tell that person not to vote.”Tyler added that he’s frustrated with the idea that Trump’s inflammatory comments about immigrants are racist. “It’s ridiculous,” said Tyler, adding that his wife came to the US from the Philippines. “She loves Donald Trump.” More

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    Trump escalates insults against Harris as he faces scrutiny over alleged praise of Hitler

    Donald Trump escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris at a Wednesday evening rally in Georgia as he faces growing scrutiny over reports of his praise of Hitler and alleged sexual misconduct.“This woman is crazy,” the former president said at an event in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth, hosted by Turning Point USA, a far-right youth group. He said voters should stand up to the vice-president and tell her: “You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.” He also said that in her recent interview with CBS, she “gave an answer that was from a loony bin”, later adding: “She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual.”The rally, less than two weeks before election day, came after the Guardian published an interview with a former model who accused Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in 1993 after notorious sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein introduced them, an allegation the Trump campaign denied. Stacey Williams said it felt as if the unwanted touching was part of a “twisted game” between the two men and that it appeared Epstein and Trump were “really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together”.

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    Williams’s account put the spotlight back on the roughly two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct throughout his career. Harris, campaigning with Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has sought to encourage Republican women to support the Democrat.The Georgia rally also came after Harris’s surprise speech in Washington DC on Wednesday, when she denounced the former president as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power”. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, told the New York Times this week that he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. He also said Trump repeatedly commented: “Hitler did some good things, too.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a characteristically rambling speech, Trump went on meandering tangents about Google (“Google is treating us much better. Do you notice that? What happened to Google?”); McDonald’s (“McDonald’s was one of the most viewed things that [Google] ever had”); Emmanuel Macron (“I stopped wars with France”); Richard Nixon (“That was not good when they found out he taped every single conversation”); and the vice-president’s name (“You can’t call her ‘Harris’ because nobody knows who the hell you’re talking about”).He threatened to sue CBS’s 60 Minutes, repeating false claims that the station manipulated Harris’s interview after Trump backed out of his planned interview with the program. He reiterated the threat a second time about an hour later in his speech.Robert F Kennedy Jr, former independent presidential candidate, also rallied for Trump in Georgia, calling Kelly a “known liar”. Trump did not address Kelly at the rally, but on Truth Social called his former chief of staff a “LOWLIFE” and “total degenerate”.In a “faith-focused” town hall in Zebulon, Georgia earlier on Wednesday, Trump praised Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister who has been condemned for undermining democratic institutions and aligning with Moscow and Beijing.Asked about his faith, Trump responded: “When you believe in God, it’s a big advantage over people that don’t have that.” He went on to falsely suggest he has endured more investigations than notorious gangster Al Capone. More

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    Olivia Nuzzi leaves New York magazine after revelation of RFK Jr relationship

    The politics writer Olivia Nuzzi and New York magazine have parted ways just over a month after she was placed on leave following the disclosure that she had engaged in a “personal” relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr.The departure was announced in a statement from New York magazine on Monday afternoon.In the statement, the publication noted that the law firm they hired to review Nuzzi’s work during her reporting on the 2024 campaign, which included a lengthy profile of Kennedy, found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” in her coverage.“Nevertheless”, the statement continued, “the magazine and Nuzzi agreed that the best course forward is to part ways. Nuzzi is a uniquely talented writer and we have been proud to publish her work over her nearly eight years as our Washington Correspondent.“We wish her the best,” it added.Shortly after the magazine released the statement, an attorney for Nuzzi also issued a statement saying that the reporter was “gratified though not surprised that two different investigations have determined that her reporting on the 2024 campaign was sound and that she did nothing wrong.“For nearly eight years, she consistently produced critically celebrated and hugely popular journalism in her capacity as the Washington Correspondent for New York Magazine,” the statement reads, adding that Nuzzi is “grateful for the editors, fact checkers, and artists with whom she worked and to the readers who have supported her with their time, subscriptions, and engagement. She looks forward to the next chapter of her career.”The news that Nuzzi and New York magazine are parting ways comes a little over a month after the magazine placed Nuzzi on leave and released their initial statement.In that statement the publication announced that Nuzzi had admitted to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with Kennedy while reporting on the campaign, which, the publication said, was a “violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.“Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign,” the magazine said on 19 September.At the time, the magazine said that an internal review of her published work had found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias, and announced that Nuzzi was currently on leave. The magazine added that it was conducting a more thorough third-party review.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We regret this violation of our readers’ trust,” the statement read.In September, Nuzzi also acknowledged the relationship in a statement and said that earlier in 2024, the nature of some communication between herself and a former reporting subject “turned personal” adding that during that time, she did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source.She continued: “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I
    deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”It later came out that the source was RFK Jr, who Nuzzi had written a lengthy profile on while he was running his high-profile Independent campaign for president, before he suspended his run and endorsed Donald Trump in August.A spokesperson for RFK Jr told CNN last month that Kennedy “only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece”. More

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    Ethel Kennedy obituary

    Ethel Kennedy, who has died aged 96, was one of the most active and best-known US political wives of the 20th century. As her husband, Robert F Kennedy, campaigned first for the Senate and then for the presidency, she supported him while also bringing up their children. The 11th and last of them, her daughter Rory, was born after Bobby was assassinated in 1968. From the 1970s onwards, Ethel devoted herself to social causes and was latterly co-chair of the Coalition of Gun Control.Her life had been touched by tragedy earlier, when her parents died in a plane crash in 1955. Her brother-in-law, President John F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963. Two of her children died prematurely – David of a drug overdose at the age of 28 in 1984 and Michael in a skiing accident in 1997, when he was 39. Her husband was shot at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles following his victory in the California primary for the US presidential race.Sustained by a strong Catholic faith, she remained, in the view of writer Hays Gorey, “an incorrigibly cheerful widow”, never permitting gloom to descend on the frenetic lifestyle that had always been found at Hickory Hill, the family home in McLean, Virginia. The place was strewn with footballs and tennis rackets, and no-one was allowed to sit around and mope.Ethel used sport to promote her husband’s legacy and raise money for the wide variety of charities that fell under the umbrella of the Robert Kennedy Foundation, which also administered what is now Robert F Kennedy Human Rights. This led to the creation of a memorial tennis tournament at Forest Hills, New York, a pro-celebrity event that for several years in the 1970s was played on the eve of the US Open.View image in fullscreenBorn in Chicago, Ethel was the sixth of seven children of Ann (nee Brannack), a devout Catholic, and George Skakel, who went from an $8 a week job as a railway clerk to selling coal and founding a company called Great Lakes Coal & Coke. When Ethel was five the family moved east, eventually settling in Connecticut, where she attended Greenwich academy. She became friends with Jean Kennedy, Bobby’s sister, while they were both studying at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in New York city. Meanwhile, Bobby – whom Ethel first met on a skiing trip in Quebec in 1945 – was dating Ethel’s sister, Patricia. When they broke up, Ethel began the partnership that would define her life.Ethel campaigned for John F Kennedy when he ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1946. She married his younger brother in 1950, and the following year their first child, Kathleen, was born.“They had a wonderful relationship, full of banter and repartee,” recalled Donald Dell, a US Davis Cup captain in the 60s, who played tennis with the couple and became a family friend. “Ethel used to needle Bobby all the time and he gave as good as he got. But he was always very protective of her and she fiercely loyal to him.”View image in fullscreenWhen JFK ran for the Senate in 1952, Bobby managed the campaign. Throughout the rest of the 50s, Ethel supported Bobby as he climbed the political ladder, and when JFK went to the White House in 1960, Bobby was appointed attorney general.The assassination of JFK in 1963 changed Bobby and Ethel’s lives abruptly. Bobby continued the Kennedy story by successfully running for the Senate in 1964 and then decided to join the 1968 presidential race himself.Early in the campaign, that March, came the stunning news that President Lyndon B Johnson had decided not to run for a second term. It immediately made Bobby Kennedy a hot favourite to win the Democratic nomination and, in many people’s minds, the presidency. But that dream died after shots were fired in the kitchen of the Los Angeles hotel in June.Dealing steadfastly with her bereavement, Ethel drew on a wide and diverse array of “pals”, as she used to call them, to boost her charitable work. Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jnr and Charlton Heston were among the celebrities who were always available when she called. A friend remembers her phoning Heston, whom she always referred to as Chuckles, in an attempt to get him to persuade Roy Emerson, the Wimbledon champion, to play in her tournament. “In return I’ll take a part in one your movies,” she joked. “But I don’t want a maid’s part – I want some love interest!”There was some speculation about possible “love interest” between Ethel and the singer Andy Williams during the years following her husband’s death. This gossip continued until, citing her Catholic views, she announced a decision never to re-marry.In a later age, a new generation was swept up in the Kennedy lifestyle. Taylor Swift, the country music star, was 23 when she spent some time with the then 84-year-old widow at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 2012. Swift declined to go swimming because a couple of her friends had not brought their swimsuits. “Being that thoughtful, you’ll run the risk of being boring,” said Ethel. “Go on, get in the water!”“So I jumped in,” said Swift. “I took it as a metaphor for life. You have to jump in; you have to take your chances. Ethel taught me that.”In May 2014, the Benning Road Bridge, which links Washington DC to Anacostia in Maryland, was renamed the Ethel Kennedy Bridge in recognition of the decades of work she had put in to improve the lives of young people living alongside the Anacostia River, reportedly one of the most polluted in America. To kick start the project in 1992, Ethel had waded in to pluck old tyres and debris from the water.The Kennedy most in the news recently has been her son Robert F Kennedy Jr, who abandoned presidential runs first as a Democrat, and then as an independent. Ethel is survived by him, four other sons, Joseph, Christopher, Max and Douglas, and four daughters, Kathleen, Courtney, Kerry and Rory. More

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    The real victims of Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr are other female journalists | Moira Donegan

    Anyone who is not a moralist or kidding themselves will admit that a good piece of gossip is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Gossip exposes the false sanctimony of the powerful: it reveals the smug and self-righteous to be grubby, selfish and embarrassing – just like the rest of us. If the pronouncements of politicians make history, and the reporting of the media shapes that history’s official narrative, gossip runs along behind them, like a bratty younger sibling, filling in their omissions to tell a truer story. “You left out this part.” “That’s not what you told me.”Maybe this is why media gossip about journalists and politicians carries such a frisson of transgressive delight: it breaks their monopoly on narrative authority. The people who have been appointed to tell us stories about our world, and about ourselves, finally get themselves subjected to the same treatment. It helps, too, to bust the bubble of a media industry that has long demanded more moral gravitas than it has really earned. These are the people, after all, who claim to be holding power to account. But how do they actually behave towards those in power?And so it was maybe predictable that so many people would feel a gleeful jolt of schadenfreude last week, when New York Magazine revealed that it had suspended Olivia Nuzzi, a young star reporter known for her biting wit and deep bench of Republican sources. The cause? Nuzzi had allegedly admitted to sexting with one of her reporting subjects: the anti-vax crusader, animal corpse desecrator, former presidential candidate and brain worm host Robert F Kennedy Jr.Love is blind, and it could be that Nuzzi simply has unconventional taste. But the incident has taken on heavy symbolic proportions, becoming a litmus test within media circles for various opinions on journalistic ethics, how to earn and keep readers’ trust, and the journalists’ vexed obligations to the truth in an industry where models of “access journalism” routinely incentivize them to have close – even cozy – relationships with those they cover.Nuzzi, in particular, has a talent for getting incendiary and controversial figures on the right to say things that they probably shouldn’t, and media watchers have long speculated that this might be because of her own conservative leanings: that she is able to ingratiate herself to rightwing subjects because she is able to convince them that she offers a sympathetic ear. In that much, at least, any honest journalist will have to admit that Nuzzi is not alone. But she seems to have taken her sympathy for her subjects far beyond the industry baseline.Not everyone finds Nuzzi’s conduct objectionable on journalistic grounds. Ben Smith, the former New York Times media columnist who now runs the outlet Semafor, used his newsletter to ask what all the fuss was about. He claimed that British journalists had texted him to the effect of: “If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?”The NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik characterizes this statement from Smith as “bananas”. We might also add that it is insulting to Smith’s colleagues, be they American, British or anything else – and in particular, to the women. It implies that there are large numbers of female journalists trading sex for access. There are not. It is rare, and more than frowned upon, for journalists to sleep with their sources or subjects: doing so compromises the integrity of the work. And most female journalists, like most female professionals in any field, are not interested in trading on their sexuality for professional advancement.And yet Smith’s defense of Nuzzi was not the only comment that seemed to take a kind of prurient delight in the story. Almost immediately, RFK Jr sympathizers started leaking stories to the media that seemed aimed at minimizing his own role in the relationship and portraying Nuzzi as a sex-starved obsessive, who “bombarded” the Kennedy scion against his will with “increasingly pornographic photos and videos that he found difficult to resist”, in the words of Jessica Reed Kraus. Sure.Other outlets, eager to credulously repeat these claims, took a similar track. The New York Post ran a story to this effect that featured an image of Nuzzi in a bikini. Another journalist, Keith Olbermann, chimed in with the irrelevant and unhelpful information that he also dated Nuzzi once, back when he was in his mid-50s and she was in her early 20s. The Daily Beast went to far as to publish a gross fictionalization of Nuzzi and RFK Jr’s correspondence.The schadenfreude has changed its tenor: from delight in the revealed hypocrisies of the powerful to delight in the sexual humiliation of a woman. It is assumed that it is Nuzzi’s sexuality itself – rather than her decision to direct it toward a subject of her reporting – that disqualifies her from public dignity.Let’s be clear: Nuzzi is not a victim. There is no indication that her relationship with RFK Jr was anything but consensual, however distasteful we may find it. Nor does she appear to be a woman of robust feminist commitments. Not only has Nuzzi routinely cozied up to powerful Republican political players, but until recently she was engaged to the Politico writer Ryan Lizza, who was fired from the New Yorker in 2017 for alleged sexual misconduct. The misogyny directed against her, then, raises an uncomfortable question for feminists: how do we criticize the actions of patriarchal women without falling into the trap of perpetuating misogyny against them?The most ungenerous interpretation of Nuzzi’s career – which is not necessarily the most likely one – is that she used her youth and good looks to her advantage, flattering the egos of men who could get her jobs or serve as sources. In this scenario, she would have made a trade-off – sexual attention for professional opportunity. There is a tendency to demonize this kind of use of sexuality by women (and a less pronounced, usually tardy tendency to criticize such trades when they are demanded or accepted by men). It is this tendency, feeding off the unspoken and unproven assumptions about just what Nuzzi and RFK Jr were offering each other, that has led to all the slut-shaming of Nuzzi in the media.Women who make such trades are not necessarily unequipped for the jobs they get by them: talent and corruption often coexist in one person. (And whatever the controversies and uncertainties about Nuzzi herself, there is no dispute that she is very talented.) But the problem with such transactions, where they do happen, is not that the women who make them are sluts. It is that they are scabs. Such trade-offs can be consensual, but they can never really be ethical: they make it harder for other women in their industries who are not willing or able to use their sexuality to advance to do so; they set the precedent that sex for opportunity is an acceptable trade to make to female workers; they encourage men to leverage their professional power to extract sexual favors. They cast all female professionals under the suspicion of corruptibility and unseriousness.Whatever Nuzzi was doing, she doesn’t seem to have been thinking much about her female colleagues; she appears to have mostly been thinking about herself. But she’s not the only one in this scenario who deserves our attention. Spare a thought for the other women working in journalism – including many of Nuzzi’s colleagues at New York Magazine – who will now be embarrassed by unfair comparisons to her. If there’s a victim in this story, it’s them.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Trump says he won’t run for president again in 2028 if he loses in November

    Donald Trump said in an interview released on Sunday that he did not think he would run for president again in 2028 if he loses this year’s race for the White House.In an interview on the Full Measure television show with Sharyl Attkisson, the former US president – who ran in 2016 and 2020 – was asked whether he saw himself running yet again in four years time.“No, I don’t,” Trump answered. “I don’t see that at all.”He said: “Hopefully, we’re going to be successful.”In the polls, Kamala Harris leads Trump in most head-to-head surveys after Trump had previously established a solid lead over Joe Biden – before he scotched his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate performance. But the presidential race remains tight ahead of November’s election, especially in the key battleground states that will hold the key to victory.Attkisson asked Trump what positions he saw people such as the tech billionaire Elon Musk, the former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and the ex-independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, holding in his administration. Trump said he had not made deals with anybody because “it’s not appropriate to do it” and “it’s too early”.Still, he laid out what Musk, Gabbard and Kennedy, who are all former Democrats or supporters of the party, could potentially work on if he were to be elected.“Bobby will do great on health and on the environment,” he said. “He looks at other countries where they don’t use chemicals, where they use much less than we use, and the people are healthier than they are in the United States, which is not that healthy a country.”Kennedy has been campaigning for Trump since he ended his own independent presidential bid to support the Republican nominee.Trump described Gabbard, a military veteran who served as a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii before retiring, as “a common sense person”. She recently said she would “be honored to serve” under a second Trump administration. Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, but chose to support the Republican nominee in this year’s elections.During a Fox News interview, Gabbard said she was aiming for a role working on foreign policy.“I’ve known her a little bit, and it was a great honor when we got her,” Trump said in Sunday’s interview.Last month, both Gabbard and Kennedy were appointed to Trump’s transition team, which would help Trump choose policies and personnel if he were to win White House in November.Trump praised Musk as a person who can advance policies to cut costs in the federal government, an idea he has raised along with a “government efficiency commission”.“Elon is Elon,” he said. “He’s a big cost-cutter. He’s always been very good at it, and I’m good at it. But Elon, I’ll tell you what, he will go in, and he’ll say: ‘This is what you have to do. You have to do this.’ He is so into that, he feels there’s so much waste and fat in this country, and he’s right.” More

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    Reporter Olivia Nuzzi on leave after alleged personal relationship with RFK Jr revealed

    A top politics writer for New York magazine has taken leave at the publication after it emerged that she allegedly had a personal relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr, a scion of the Kennedy dynasty who ran a high-profile independent campaign for the White House before endorsing Donald Trump.Olivia Nuzzi, who has written extensive long-form pieces about US politics, including RFK Jr, violated the magazine’s standards around disclosing conflicts of interests, the publication said in a statement.“Our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures,” New York said.It added: “Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.”In a statement Nuzzi acknowledged the relationship but said it had not been a physical one and that it had developed after Nuzzi had written a piece about Kennedy and his quixotic and ultimately doomed run for the White House.Nuzzi said that “the nature of some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal” earlier this year.“During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source,” she said. “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”A spokesperson for RFK Jr told CNN that Kennedy “only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece”.RFK Jr is the son of Robert Francis Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 while running for the Democratic nomination for president, almost five years after his brother and the US president, John F Kennedy, was assassinated.RFK Jr’s 2024 independent campaign never really took off to challenge the Democrats or Republicans and his extreme stances on some issues, especially around vaccinations, did little to endear him to mainstream Americans.Nuzzi has become a high-profile American journalist and television pundit. One of her most recent pieces included an interview with Donald Trump in which the former US president invited her to examine his ear, injured in an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Recounting the experience, she wrote: “An ear had never appeared to have gone through less.” More