Trump’s Bubble Is About to Burst Oct. 17, 2026, 7:00 a.m. ET Doug Mills, The Times’s dazzling White House photographer, took a picture on Tuesday of President Trump on Marine One with his blond aides/acolytes Katie Zacharia, his wobbly new press secretary, and Natalie Harp, his special assistant for floofing. Mills took the shot from far away with a long lens, but it bristles with intimacy. The president is leaning in to talk to the two Ivanka knockoffs, who look like sorority-sister clones, four eyes glued on the man they adore, two fervent smiles glazed with pink lip gloss. He desperately craves being the center of attention, and seeing blind devotion mirrored back at him as that devotion wanes with an increasingly disgusted, exhausted public. It is a snapshot of Trump’s hunger for adulation that has dragged us to this fraught moment in America, as he surrounds himself with his image of success. Zacharia, the inept propagandist, and Harp, the so-called H...