A Karoline Leavitt photo has been erased from the internet after it sent the White House into ‘meltdown.’
The relationship between the Trump White House and the American press has never been anything less than combative.
From the earliest days of the first administration, the battle over image — literal and figurative — has been a defining feature of how this presidency operates.
Photographers have been excluded from briefings. News agencies have been publicly attacked. The president himself has taken to social media to rage about the way he has been captured on camera.
And now, a new incident has thrown that ongoing conflict into sharp relief — one that began at a cheerful Thanksgiving turkey pardon and ended with a photograph disappearing from the internet entirely.
The most antagonistic White House in living memory?
To understand why the removal of a single photograph matters, you need to understand the context in which it occurred.
Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with the same instinctive hostility toward mainstream media that defined his first term — only sharper, more systematized, and backed by a team that has moved aggressively to limit unflattering coverage.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, 27, has been at the forefront of that effort, regularly calling out individual outlets from the briefing room podium and framing critical coverage as deliberate bad faith.
Just this week, Leavitt reprimanded ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News from the briefing room for what she described as ‘despicable’ coverage failures, per People.
Meanwhile, across the Potomac, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been engaged in a legal battle to bar reporters from the Pentagon unless they agree to new and restrictive coverage policies.
And earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that photographers from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Getty Images were prevented from photographing briefings on the Iran war after Pentagon staff took issue with images of Hegseth they considered unflattering — a claim the Pentagon denied.
Trump himself set the tone back in October, taking to Truth Social to lambast a Time magazine cover photo of himself.
“Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time,” he wrote. “They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird.”
He added: “I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out.”
That last detail — the specific complaint about low-angle shots — turns out to be directly relevant to what happened next.
Thanksgiving at the White House
On November 25, 2025, the White House held its annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon ceremony — one of the more reliably lighthearted traditions in the presidential calendar.
This year’s recipient of executive clemency was a bird named Waddle, one of two turkeys raised in North Carolina and destined to live out the rest of their days at North Carolina State University’s Prestage Department of Poultry Science.
Leavitt, as press secretary, presided over a Thanksgiving-themed press briefing to mark the occasion, dressing in pilgrim-style attire and bringing along her young son, Nicholas — known as Niko — for the festivities.
Waddle was ushered into the briefing room, where he paused beside the lectern as reporters posed a series of playful questions to the bird. “Waddle, why are you getting a pardon? What did you do wrong?” one journalist asked, per the Mirror.
AFP photographer Andrew Caballero-Reynolds was among the many photographers present, capturing dozens of images of the event as it unfolded.
In the fast-moving environment of a White House press briefing, images are transmitted rapidly from the photographer’s camera to editors who begin making selections for distribution.
More than 40 such images were processed and made available. It was, by all accounts, a busy and high-volume shoot.
One of those images was initially approved, distributed through AFP’s wire service, picked up by Getty Images, and used by at least one newspaper in Switzerland. Then, it was removed.
The disappearing photo
The story of how that photograph vanished from the internet was first reported by Status journalist Oliver Darcy.
According to his reporting, the White House had made its dissatisfaction with the image known to the agency — not through any formal complaint, but by making AFP ‘aware’ that staff found it unflattering.
AFP’s director of brand and communications, Grégoire Lemarchand, confirmed the sequence of events in a statement on Tuesday, while carefully framing the removal as an entirely internal editorial decision.
He said that AFP’s editor-in-chief Mehdi Lebouachera had reviewed the image and determined it did not meet the agency’s editorial standards.
“The angle was poor and, more importantly, we already had a selection of superior images from the same event available on the wire,” Lemarchand explained. “Our editor-in-chief had already expressed reservations about the quality of the frame from the start.”
Lemarchand was emphatic that no formal pressure had been applied.
“While we were made aware that White House staff found the photo unflattering, we want to be clear that there was no formal request to remove it, nor was there any external pressure involved,” he said. “The final choice to unpublish is always made by AFP for our own editorial reasons.”
A spokesperson for Getty Images confirmed that AFP maintains full editorial control over its imagery and declined to say whether Getty had received any similar complaint from the White House directly.
The White House did not comment.
The Streisand effect takes hold
Whatever the White House’s intentions, the practical result of the controversy has been the opposite of what was presumably desired.
A photograph that had been seen by almost nobody — used by a single Swiss newspaper before being pulled — has now been shared across social media by a vast audience, including prominent commentators and public figures.
The Daily Beast noted that the image quickly ‘took on a new life‘ once the story of its removal broke, spreading rapidly precisely because it had been taken down.
The episode has become a textbook example of what is commonly known as the Streisand Effect — the phenomenon by which attempts to suppress a piece of information result in it receiving far more attention than it ever would have otherwise.
Social media users have also drawn pointed comparisons to Trump’s own October complaint about low-angle photography, noting that the shot of Leavitt appeared to have been taken from a similarly upward-looking angle — the precise type of framing Trump had publicly declared his distaste for months earlier.
What makes the Leavitt photograph story significant is not the photograph itself — it is what it represents.
Press freedom advocates and media observers have noted an unmistakable pattern of behavior by the Trump administration when it comes to photography and visual representation.
The exclusion of photographers from Iran war briefings. The legal battle over Pentagon press access. The president’s personal social media outbursts about camera angles and unflattering coverage. And now, the quiet removal of a wire service image after the White House made its feelings known.
Each individual incident can be explained away — editorial decisions, quality concerns, logistical considerations. Taken together, they form a picture of an administration that is systematically, if not always formally, attempting to shape the visual record of its own operation.
An “unflattering” photo of Karoline Leavitt has been pulled by many publications after the White House made clear its disapproval, according to TMZ. pic.twitter.com/yzgrCS3fXS
— Pop Flop (@ThePopFlop) March 31, 2026
So, what was in the photo?
The image at the center of the controversy was taken by AFP photographer Andrew Caballero-Reynolds during the Thanksgiving briefing on November 25, 2025.
Shot from a low angle looking upward, it captured Karoline Leavitt holding her young son Nicholas on her hip while looking down at Waddle the turkey, grinning broadly.
The shot, taken from below rather than at eye level, was apparently considered sufficiently unflattering by White House staff that they felt moved to make their displeasure known to one of the world‘s largest photo agencies — and the agency, whatever its stated reasons, quietly took it down.
