Oh New York Times, Trump's Glower Is Not What Smizing Is!
Source: 87 Cycles of America's Next Top Model.
I am not an art critic. I do not have a background in visual art, and I never even took an art history class in school. I am absolutely positive that I have nothing, in that arena, on New York Times critic-at-large Jason Farago.
But I will tell you what I do have expertise in. So, so much expertise that it is actually quite embarrassing.
“America’s Next Top Model.” Well, up to cycle 18, anyway. Kinda fell off after that!
It’s not exactly something to be proud of. It’s a terrible, terrible show that I fully recognize is problematic on multiple levels. Tyra was a tyrant and Janice Dickinson was an actual monster. But goddamnit, it was addictive as hell, and, for years, I’d have people over every week to watch “Top Model” and drink wine and talk shit and it was a fabulous time. Especially during the André Leon Talley years. Honestly, I still feel #blessed to have been able to witness so many of that man’s magnificent capes. We did not deserve him.
So trust me when I say that I am pretty sure I know just a little more about smizing than Mr. Farago.
“The fuck are you on about, Robyn?” you may be asking yourselves right now.
This, friends is the fuck I am on about.
Now, I don’t know why The New York Times decided to give Donald Trump’s presidential portrait the full art criticism treatment, but they did. The end product was a strange mix of criticism (the regular kind) and rather undeserved sanewashing.
Via New York Times:
The new official image, shot by the government photographer Daniel Torok, presents the incumbent in tight close-up and obscure quarters. Its lighting is immoderate, its tone forbidding, but compared to the last one its subject’s mood has actually brightened.
For that previous portrait, released at the time of the presidential transition in January 2025, Mr. Torok used egregious spotlighting from below that gave Mr. Trump the mien of a horror movie villain. The ex-president become president-elect glowered and squinted, in marked imitation of his mug shot taken at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta.
The new portrait, by contrast, displays a classically Trumpian tonal incongruity; for all the darkness, note the humor. The lighting is more head-on. Mr. Trump’s shoulders are relaxed, his affect has softened. His neutral expression is moderated by a slight warmth in the eyes — a classic pose that a younger generation, following the supermodel Tyra Banks, knows to call “smizing.”
That’s not smizing. Smizing means “smiling with your eyes” and those eyes are very far from smiling. I don’t know where Farago gets the idea that there is any warmth in them. He’s still glowering. Smizing is meant to make your face look alive even though you are doing your fierce model face. (Actual smiling is for commercial/catalog only!)
This is smizing:
He just looks constipated. And ominous. He's Constipominousing.
You just can’t smize with cold, beady snake eyes like that. It is physically impossible.
He’s making practically the same dour face he was in his mugshot and in his other portrait. Sure, he looks slightly less evil, but that’s more about lighting than anything else. If anything, his brow is even more furrowed. I’m trying to “note the humor” and yet, I cannot.
What I have noted is the way the face is dragged down, which actually does seem to be a big part of the MAGA aesthetic. If you will notice, practically all of the women in Trump world wear their blush weirdly low on their faces, causing a sort of drooping effect that kind of defeats the purpose of all that cheek filler (once you see it, you can’t unsee it).
It took me a moment to figure out exactly where I’d seen this particular glower before.
Some more WTF for you:
Year by year, though, the president’s taste has become the public’s. The portrait’s twilit gloss rhymes with the set designs of the last few Republican national conventions, with gold and black substituting for red, white and blue, and continues an aesthetic of obsidian flash extending all the way back to Trump Tower, the dark, domineering skyscraper that has loomed over Fifth Avenue since 1983 like an oversized vial of Drakkar Noir.
Okay, Mr. Farago. That’s quite good!
By 2025, the Trumpian aesthetic has now propagated well past politics, into the tech world and the sports industry, into restaurants and nightlife, into influencers hawking cryptocurrency and vertical videos of fitness supplements. Visually, stylistically, Mr. Trump has not changed — but we have, and I have always believed that political opponents who mocked or dismissed the president’s aesthetic appeal did so at their peril. In defying traditional elites’ tastes, in showing indifference to the visual expectations of others, there lies a curious image of strength.
Bitch where?
Like, outside of actual MAGA people, I don’t see anyone else — certainly no restaurants or nightlife that I’ve seen, unless you count the time that my sister and I ended up in a horrifying Trump-themed grocery store, lured in by the promise of “free drinks for ladies” at their upstairs bar.
I fully recognize that his terrible aesthetics are deeply appealing to his fans, but it’s not a thing for anyone outside of that world. In fact, I would say that the rest of us do all we can to separate ourselves from anything that reminds us of them — aesthetically, as well as every other possible way we can imagine.
There is just something deeply unsettling about treating a portrait of someone as dangerous as Trump as an exercise in (rather overwrought, frankly) art criticism — and I say this as someone with a deep interest in the way aesthetics and politics intertwine. It’s not something that’s not worthy of discussion — and Farago’s point that it looks like all of the AI portraits of him that his terrible fans make was a good and interesting one. It’s possible to have that discussion without noting the humor or the non-existent warmth in his eyes.
I’m not sure what they were trying to do with this, but whatever it was, it didn’t work.
NYT reviews Auschwitz - “All horrors aside, the parallel lines and perpendicular pathways that cross in front of the gas chambers and crematoria invoke an ephemeral wisp of the Bauhaus concept of architecture”
He looks like he’s struggling to hold in diarrhea.