Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post

The image above, taken a few days ago, is the way Trump wants to be seen — from a low angle — powerfully commanding the spotlight, microphones thrust forward to record his pronouncements, alone on the White House lawn, half shouting over the clatter of helicopter rotors.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

All the pictures tend to look more or less the same. The president orchestrating the press gaggle assembled in front of him, unseen out of frame except for the boom mics. Even as he admonishes them as fake news, he basks in the attention, the warm bath of power and glory. The press at once resistive and complicit. The boundary between real and reality TV erased in perfect symbiosis.

Stephanie Grisham/White House Press Secretary

Here’s a different, perhaps more truthful, view of the same moment, a view that breaks the fourth wall of reality TV. It was taken, ironically, by Stephanie Grisham, the newly anointed press secretary, twice arrested drunk driver, replacement for the execrable Sarah Huckabee Sanders who has moved over to Fox News, the propaganda organ of the Trump regime.

From her somewhat distant remove she captures the whole sun-dappled scene peering through the trunks of a tree on the White House grounds. The tree introduces a slightly voyeuristic note as if we are spying, partly obscuring our view of the proceedings. One can almost hear Trump barking, the reporters shouting out questions, the camera shutters chattering.

The members of the press are assembled on a tiered grandstand — there are three rows — the sound recorders squatting on the first rung arms outstretched thrusting their mics forward. The videographers, photographers, and scribes are mixed together on the next two levels. Trump, who has just exited Marine One, stands close to his interlocutors, perhaps the better to hear and be heard, or perhaps, to physically crowd the space between him, the media, and his unseen millions of viewers. Trump stands so close, pitched awkwardly forward in his shoe-lifts, that the photographers have to go wide with their zooms which exaggerate Trump’s size in relation to the sylvan landscape beyond.

The reality is that the president’s stature diminishes daily. We are, possibly, in the waning days of Trump’s stolen presidency. His words ramble, his mind meanders, his anger boils, his voracious hunger for validation remains unsatisfied, and his grip on reality slips inexorably toward oblivion.