Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s efforts to make light of a bombshell two-part Vanity Fair article that rattled the Trump administration this week drew a wisecrack from Vice President JD Vance.
On Wednesday, Rubio updated his profile image on X to one of the article’s divisive photos by Christopher Anderson, which shows him in side profile.
Moments later, Vance responded to Rubio’s post with a dunk.
“I guess I owe that guy $1,000,” he wrote.
Vance’s comment was an allusion to a joking exchange he’d reportedly had with Anderson at the White House last month during the photoshoot.
“I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me,” he told Anderson, per The New York Times. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”
Anderson photographed a total of seven members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle for Vanity Fair. In addition to Rubio and Vance, the spread included White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, chief of staff Susie Wiles and deputy chiefs of staff James Blair, Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino.
The photos, some of which Anderson shot in extreme close-up, drew heated criticism from conservatives once Vanity Fair unveiled them online this week. Many GOP officials, Wiles included, have also attempted to discredit the content of the magazine’s two-part article, written by Chris Whipple.
Much of the attention was focused on a photo of Leavitt in which markings from her apparent lip filler injections are visible. In an earlier post on X, Rubio accused Vanity Fair of having “deliberately manipulated” the images to make White House officials “look bad.”
Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
Anderson, however, stood behind his work, noting that close-up images are a signature fixture of his political portraiture, as seen in his 2014 book, “Stump.”
“It’s part of how I think about portraiture in a lot of ways: close, intimate, revealing,” he told The Washington Post in an interview published Wednesday. “I’ve photographed all political stripes just like this. You will find in my book pictures of Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, beloved figures on the left photographed in the same way.”
Anderson, who previously photographed Trump himself in close-up for the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 2017, also defended himself in a lengthy Instagram post.
“It’s shocking to me that the world expects reality to be removed from a picture. My intention is not mockery or cheap shots,” he wrote Thursday. “I’d like to think I’m a stone-faced but critical observer.”
He went on to note: “Celebrity photos are celebrity photos. Politicians are not celebrities. Let’s not mix things up.”