Trump, Zacharia and Harp: The Photo Everyone Is Talking About
A tough start for the new press secretary
Katie Zacharia’s first week in the job has been anything but quiet. Taking over from Karoline Leavitt, she faced the White House press corps for the first time on October 13. It was a short and stiff outing. She worked mostly from prepared notes, rarely looked up, and answered only a handful of questions before heading out after about a quarter of an hour. Jimmy Kimmel was blunt in his verdict, calling the whole thing a “total disaster.”
For a moment, her rocky debut seemed to shift the spotlight away from Natalie Harp, the aide who has stayed close to the president for a long time. That didn’t last. A new photograph put both women, and Trump, right back at the centre of online chatter.
The picture itself
The image was taken aboard Marine One. Trump sits closest to the door, turned toward his two aides. Harp and Zacharia are both beaming at him, apparently deep in conversation, while two guards stand holding the door open behind them.
It spread fast. The timing also coincided with ongoing speculation about Melania Trump and talk of her needing to focus on “protecting her heart” amid rumors about her marriage, which only added fuel to the online conversation.
What the Daily Beast commentators made of it
Joanna Coles and Michael Wolff picked the photo apart during their regular YouTube segment, Inside Trump’s Head. Coles said she was “mesmerised” by it. In her view, the way Trump was positioned made him look like an elderly relative being wheeled along a seaside promenade in a Victorian bath chair, the sort with a blanket across the knees, the kind of scene she associated with Brighton or the south of France.
She also described the two women as blond and smiling at him in an almost fawning way, adding that she suspected both wore hair extensions, though she was only sure about Zacharia’s.
Was it staged?
Wolff took the conversation in a different direction. He pointed out that Doug Mills, the New York Times photographer who captured the image, is widely seen as Trump’s favorite. According to Wolff, scenes around the president are often arranged with Mills in mind, and Mills is typically given the best seat or vantage point to get the shot.
His conclusion was measured: if the photo wasn’t outright staged, Mills had at least been given the access needed to get it.
The message Trump might be sending
Coles then asked what Trump could be signalling by allowing such an image out. She offered her own tongue-in-cheek interpretation, imagining the message as: “I may be old, I may look old, I may have my cankles on display, but I’ve got two young blonds at my knees.”
Wolff agreed, tying it to a line he says circulated around Trump’s legal team during his indictments and trials. In his 2025 book All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, he wrote a slightly different version of it: “I may not have the best legal team, but I have the hottest.”
How social media reacted
Mills himself posted the photo on X on October 14, and the comments came quickly. One user said Trump “certainly has a type,” while another called the whole thing “all so very strange.” A third quipped that Trump seemed to have surrounded himself with Ivankas and must miss his daughter. Others predicted a rivalry, with one commenter imagining a “cage match” between the two aides in the Oval Office.
The takeaway
It’s worth remembering that the staging claim is Wolff’s opinion, not an established fact, and he himself hedged it by saying Mills was at minimum given privileged access. Still, the episode shows how quickly a single image can take over the conversation, especially when it involves a brand-new press secretary and a president whose public image is so carefully watched.
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