In the sixth and final installment of Paul W.S. Anderson’s original “Resident Evil” film franchise, the writer-director — known for his abrasive, nu-metal vulgar auteurism — raises a middle finger of sorts to his detractors. Over 17 years and thousands of poor reviews, Anderson’s adaptations of the beloved Capcom survival-horror video game series became somewhat famous for pissing off critics and diehard game fans alike. The bulk of Anderson’s sprawling vision chose to forgo the games’ shadowy zombie story for high-octane thrills and compelling (if clunky) commentary on corporate greed, biological warfare, AI and identity. His “Resident Evil” films are unapologetically ambitious and undeniably imperfect, much like their human lead, Alice (Milla Jovovich), whose sole mission is to retain her humanity in a world eating itself alive. In charmingly symbiotic fashion, neither Alice nor Anderson himself is willing to give up on their mission without a fight.

As if Anderson were taking a victory lap to celebrate the impressive feat of making six films in a series that was horribly reviewed but terribly financially successful, a flashback sequence in 2016’s “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter” closes the sextet’s loop. In the scene, set just before the events of 2002’s “Resident Evil,” executives at the diabolical Umbrella Corporation gather to discuss the world’s impending end. Nuclear war is a real possibility, climate change is inevitable, famine and death are on the horizon. Umbrella’s answer? The T-Virus, a mutagenic pathogen that will bring an undead plague across the Earth, leaving it free for Umbrella’s higher-ups and other wealthy patrons to inhabit once the zombies are safely eradicated. “We will emerge onto a cleansed Earth,” says Umbrella CEO Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), “one that we can then reboot in our image.” 

Here, Anderson’s message is clear: Whoever has the power controls the image. And if one doesn’t like that image, they’re free to fight back. But to know what they’re fighting for, one must first understand what they’re fighting against, engaging with the enemy rather than dismissing it.

That idea has been rattling around my mind after seeing Zach Cregger’s new “Resident Evil,” itself a reboot made in its creator’s image. Cregger’s film is more faithful to the spirit of the original games, with uncertainty and plenty of monsters just around every dark corner. The movie trades the gun-slinging Umbrella defector Alice for a medical courier named Bryan (Austin Abrams), who finds himself completely out of his depth when a routine delivery mutates into something much more horrifying.

“I’d rather watch a movie starring a schlub who’s out of shape and never fired a gun before,” Cregger told Polygon of his adaptation. Unlike Alice, Bryan is the audience stand-in: the average guy who responds to a mind-boggling, impossible situation as clumsily as you or I might. Critics and audiences responded in turn, taking an immediate shine to Bryan’s doofiness and contrasting it with Alice’s purposeful, goal-oriented approach to a zombie apocalypse. One review called Cregger’s movie “different and much better than the other ‘Resident Evil’ movies,” which were termed “depersonalized zombie sludge.”

I find that to be the trouble with the way people watch and talk about films these days, as if a movie’s merit is defined by whether or not it reflects the viewer. Everything has become so hyper-personalized and algorithmic that viewers subconsciously watch media looking for themselves. The line between art and commerce has blurred so much that people unintentionally conflate all visual media with advertising — if they can’t see themselves in it, they’re not buying it.

But that is the great joy of Anderson’s “Resident Evil” films: They are so remarkably stylized, so absurdly over-the-top, so referential and deferent to Anderson’s own inspirations, that they’ve become singular visions. The mere fact that there are six increasingly wacky installments should be enough to warrant curiosity. And yet, Anderson’s “Resident Evil” has always been the butt of the joke, brushed off largely because his movies dared to be different when people wanted more of the same.

Perhaps that’s rich, given just how much DNA the original “Resident Evil” franchise shares with the “Matrix,” “Mad Max,” and “Alien” franchises. And I’m no fool; having seen all of Anderson’s “Resident Evil” films, I know they are not created equal. Some, like the fifth installment, “Retribution” — which reorients the series to a much more salient, focused place — stand head and shoulders above others. But not every “Matrix,” “Alien,” “Mad Max,” or other film franchise movie shares the same quality as its in-universe peers, either. While one might argue that those are original titles of distinguished quality, it’s unfair to write off “Resident Evil” simply because it’s a game adaptation. After all, Anderson’s most fascinating ideas merge the immersive structure of gaming with the spectacle of filmmaking, and he’s one of the few filmmakers who has successfully pulled off such an audacious combination.

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From the start, Alice is the viewer’s avatar, at once a skilled security operative and someone with no memory of their past. She, much like the person behind the proverbial controller, is dropped into a world quickly becoming overrun by a viral plague with no idea what to do. Press A to jump. Press X to shoot. Press Y+X for the combo move. Because we learn alongside Alice — only watching instead of playing — Anderson forges a connection between the viewer and the character on screen without running the analog cable that connects a controller to a console, as Cregger seems keen to do. Anderson’s “Resident Evil” protagonist is not a projection of any specific viewer. Rather, she’s the film’s embodiment of a lawful good, pre-programmed to fulfill her mission linearly without getting lost in the big, open world.

Maybe that can feel stifling for some viewers. Across six films, Alice rarely faces a challenge that she can’t overcome. Even the endings feel like save points, with Alice respawning at the start of each consecutive movie with another mutated monkey on her back. 

For me, that’s where Anderson’s series gets its draw. Alice is placed in an impossible situation with no say in the matter, and no choice but to fight her way out. As she progresses through the level-by-level (or, in this case, film-by-film) structure, the knowledge she acquires informs her identity and reorients her spirit. Alice’s humanity is defined by her total rejection of the manufactured digital world and the havoc its creators wrought. Her quest is not to defeat all of the monsters, but to always remember that every zombie was, like her, human. That’s how she holds onto her soul.

But no matter how noble Alice’s mission is, her consistent character is no match for Anderson’s heavy hand. His “Resident Evil” films are as gratuitous as they are ridiculous — often repetitive and typically predictable. I’ve never found that to be a barrier to entry, especially for something so balls-to-the-wall exciting as these movies. The merits of so-called vulgar auteurism are often debated among film fans. But to say that no filmmakers are working in mainstream, high-flying, big-budget action with real artistic value negates the principle of filmmaking as an art form. Just because something doesn’t fit into the regressive limitations of “good” and “bad” doesn’t mean that it has no worth. Assertions of vulgar auteurism don’t necessarily suggest that a film is as “good” as others of its ilk, only that the film earnestly explores ideas as enduring as those in any formally rigid, awards-bait film. Anderson’s “Resident Evil” franchise — with all of its ruminations on identity in the tech age, artificially intelligent warfare, corruption and greed — certainly fits that bill.

 

I find that I’m beating this drum daily, trying to convince people that thoughtfully engaging with art they don’t immediately like or understand is a worthwhile practice. But we’ve reached a moment in media consumption where reputation is practically insurmountable. It’s become more difficult to convince people of “bad” media’s merits, to encourage them to see with eyes other than their own. I stumble into these moments all the time, waxing poetic about misunderstood and misread films like Halle Berry’s “Catwoman,” or claiming Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” is a bold feminist text and not 110 minutes of CGI-laden misogyny. In all my years of picking apart films to grasp why they appeal to my senses, I’ve watched others’ curiosity decline, especially in the face of someone else’s passion. Now that Cregger’s “Resident Evil” looks and feels a bit more like the classic games, I fear the effusive reaction will drown out Anderson’s franchise’s nutty strengths forever. 

Of course, not everything has to be highbrow and meaningful. Some things are silly, and will be just fine remaining that way. But it’s the inclination to bang the gavel and move on that irks me. With AI images bleeding into the real world at a pace none of us can keep up with, there’s human marvel to behold in Anderson’s madness. These are films of strenuous work and daring vision, even when their execution doesn’t always match up with those big ideas. Analyzing what works and what doesn’t, instead of dismissing the whole thing outright, is a free and life-affirming way to connect with the world and its people. Investigating everything further — following Alice down the rabbit hole and fighting alongside her to preserve what makes us human — might be laborious at times, sure. But it just might be one of the last ways to save our souls.

The post We got the original “Resident Evil” films all wrong appeared first on Salon.com.

A few weeks ago, I met an acquaintance for coffee at a Cuban café attached to a downtown hostel, where people with backpacks of varying dimensions passed steadily through the lobby. He worked at a nearby university and had messaged me on LinkedIn saying he wanted to tell me about the campus and talk about teaching some night classes. Knowing academia and the speed at which it tends to move, I interpreted “talk about teaching” as something closer to perhaps someday, pending several committees and a minor geological event.

I ordered a large black iced coffee in a clear plastic cup with a black straw. After sitting for a few minutes, he asked if we wanted to turn this into a walking meeting. 

Somewhere between being handed a peel-and-stick visitor badge by a friendly security guard and being introduced to the dean with, “This is Ashlie, who I told you about,” I realized our casual coffee had become considerably more interview-shaped than I had anticipated.

I, meanwhile, was carrying a sweating plastic cup.

Thankfully, I had taken an extra napkin from the café. After being shuttled in less than half an hour between aggressive air conditioning, a muggy Chicago street and the temperate library, the cup had begun producing condensation at an alarming rate. I swaddled it in paper and successfully completed my introductions with a non-moist handshake.

All this to say, I understand why the question of whether iced coffee is unprofessional has taken over my feeds for the last several days.

By the time I reached the argument on Sunday — while scanning my phone on the train, heading, truly, to get another iced coffee — the original TikTok from a corporate recruiter warning that bringing one to an interview looked overly casual had migrated to LinkedIn. There, the discussion shifted from seven-part heroes’ journeys centered on skipping little luxuries like Starbucks to drink-based dominance theory. One piece of advice I encountered warned against accepting any beverage during an interview because doing so made you “the beta.”

I scoffed.

Soon, however, I started mentally moving my own cup through different rooms. Coffee-shop meeting: obviously fine. Conference table: Less so? Hot coffee: more professional somehow? Dunkin’, in one of its decidedly undemure pink-and-orange vessels? A tasteful local cup, perhaps communicating discernment and neighborhood loyalty?

Admittedly, my professional history makes me a poor control group. I have spent most of my career in newsrooms and restaurants; one restaurant poured me an iced coffee before we sat at the bar to discuss a front-of-house job.

Still, I eventually found the fear. My brain furnished the room immediately: C-suite office. Pristine mahogany desk. No coaster. One sweating plastic cup inching toward permanent damage.

The more I thought about the coffee, the less the coffee seemed to be the point. Professional life is crowded with micro-signals — clothes, cups, phones, tone, timing, posture — ordinary things that remain perfectly neutral until someone decides they are evidence of character.

Maybe this is why I have long treated “Ask a Manager” as both advice column and anthropological expedition behind the cubicle wall, where completely ordinary behaviors can become freighted with professional meaning. In one personally beloved 2015 post, readers confessed to cheerfully disappearing for two-hour lunches because the company had advertised Spanish classes, heading off to yoga in the middle of the afternoon because, well, yoga was offered, showing up to a board meeting in jeans and a hoodie, and maintaining what amounted to a full-service beauty counter in a cubicle, complete with makeup brushes and a plugged-in hair straightener.

Some of these people were not flagrantly blowing off work. They were trying, quite earnestly, to understand it. You said the company values work-life balance; I am therefore going to yoga. There is something almost touching about the literalism.

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The problem with unwritten rules, of course, is that some people have already been taught them.

A friend of mine once received paternal advice to retire his collection of personality socks until he had secured a job at a law firm. These were not, I should stress, shocking socks. They were J.Crew socks: tiny lobsters, reindeer, tasteful little acts of rebellion occurring mostly below the trouser cuff.

This is the maddening bargain at the center of so much professional advice: show personality, but not too much. Be memorable, but not for the wrong thing. Be yourself, but preferably the version of yourself who already knows how much of yourself this particular room permits.

“You don’t want to give them a reason to say no,” his father told him, “especially a dumb one.”

That wisdom becomes less funny the farther you stand from whatever a workplace has already decided looks like belonging. If you fall outside the traditional corporate default — by class, race, gender, disability, accent, education or simple familiarity with white-collar culture — more of those supposedly intuitive rules may have to be learned in real time.

And then there are people with enough status to become their own code. I once had a news director who, in the midst of marital issues, carried a guitar from cubicle to cubicle like the world’s saddest bard. Some found it charming, some unbearable, but in the end everyone shrugged: Well, he’s the boss.

Then the pandemic arrived and made the whole system stranger.

For a brief period, Americans thought very hard about what was behind their heads. A bookshelf became a statement. So did a plant. Room Rater built an audience scoring Zoom backgrounds for lighting, depth, art and visible cords; books themselves became set dressing.

This now feels faintly incredible. We were all amateur production designers of our own domestic lives.

And yet something did change. A dog wandering through frame became normal. So did a kitchen. A child interrupting a meeting became, depending on the meeting, either completely understandable or still mortifying. The rules did not disappear; they became even more dependent on that maddening instruction: read the room.

Which may be why we keep turning tiny behaviors into evidence of enormous generational shifts. Take the “Gen Z stare,” that supposedly blank look younger service workers give customers expecting a burst of social acknowledgment. I’m less concerned with whether a cashier performs delight at my arrival than with the more substantive question of whether younger workers had fewer chances to practice things like communication, adaptability and conflict resolution during a digital-first, pandemic-disrupted adolescence. Employers have reported concerns in precisely those areas, though those skills can also be taught and practiced.

There are rituals of professionalism whose disappearance I will survive. I do not require the personality socks to remain hidden. I do not need a service worker to beam. I do not believe hot coffee carries an innate moral seriousness unavailable to iced.

What I do think we owe one another is basic situational awareness.

There is an old Yiddish joke: the schlemiel spills the soup; the schlimazel is the person it lands on. My professional philosophy may amount to little more than avoiding becoming the iced-coffee schlemiel.

There is also an evergreen iced-coffee joke online: the person who arrives late blaming the train, fresh coffee still in hand. That, frankly, bothers me more than almost anything else raised in these etiquette debates. The coffee isn’t the problem. The suspiciously fresh coffee accompanying your late arrival might be.

Don’t put the sweating cup on somebody’s papers. Don’t make your convenience someone else’s inconvenience.

Bring the iced coffee. Just don’t be late because of it.

 

The post Is iced coffee really unprofessional at a job interview? appeared first on Salon.com.

Digital journalism is as subject to fads as any other medium. Snarky fisking — responding to an article line-by-line — gave way to the quiz boom, which was consumed by the personal essay before the long decade of short-form video. But if you squint, you can see the outline of the type of stuff that always works. 

Gossipy reported pieces on scams and relationships, such as the latest news about Donald Trump’s aide Natalie Harp or The Cut’s regular output, are always a safe bet. Fightstarters over ambiguous issues — the annual argument over “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the internet-breaking Dress, countless poorly written math equations on Facebook — are evergreen. Barring that, it never hurts to channel Helen Lovejoy from “The Simpsons”: You won’t go broke thinking about how we should all think of the children. 

Over the weekend, one such piece tore through the well-meaning liberal corners of the internet — meaning Bluesky and Threads, mostly — and prodded at the gap between educational idealism and the hyper-competitive reality of schooling in America. 

In a column for the New York Times Magazine titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”, Nikole Hannah-Jones agonizes over her decision to walk the walk with regard to her belief in robust, well-funded public schools for all children. The journalist made the decision to send her child to a Brooklyn public school whose student body was predominantly Black and impoverished, believing that her well-resourced family could help push for better education for all the city’s children from within. She wrestled with the struggles her daughter faced while trying to get ahead and deciding to test into one of New York’s ultra-selective specialized public high schools.

In her column, Hannah-Jones grapples with the ways underfunded schools leave even talented students feeling pre-emptively defeated — a sense that the city’s elite schools are beyond their grasp, even if their own test scores might indicate otherwise. Overworked and burnt-out staff teaching the children of overworked and burnt-out adults isn’t a recipe for educational success, and Hannah-Jones’ recollection of her repeated frustrations and conversations with educators paints a heartbreaking picture of a systemic issue that no one family could reverse. She makes herself sick with guilt over her choices, reaching out to activists and her daughter’s former educators to help her make sense of the problem and her response to it. 

But Hannah-Jones is ultimately unsuccessful. As the principal of her daughter’s struggling middle school puts it, “there’s no model out there for holding all of these truths, these complex truths, all at once.

“We are working within the system that we know is not working, while trying to recreate and reimagine a new system, while working with young people who have all this potential, who’ve not been given the opportunities for that potential to thrive and be unleashed,” the educator says.

In the end, Hannah-Jones’ daughter succeeded against the odds, landing in a great test-in school. But it’s hard to come away from her story believing that such a result would be attainable for others. 

Once the column hit the web, it quickly devolved into a fight over whether wanting the best for your child is a betrayal of egalitarian ideals. Hannah-Jones is a gifted writer, and her piece isn’t as flat as that argument implies. But the dilemma pokes at what has long been a sore spot for well-heeled liberals. Are the exceptions that every parent would make for their child morally permissible? Does sending your child to the best possible schools make believers in a better world for all big, fat hypocrites? 

I’ll let you in on another bit of digital journalism that always holds true: Questions explored in commentaries are either unanswerable or the answer is “no.” We should have well-funded schools for all American children, where success isn’t so tied to where you call home and the relative affluence of your neighbors. We don’t, though and kids only get one shot at raising their children.

Like Hannah-Jones and her husband, I was the product of well-funded public schools. Private school was never an option for my working-class parents, but living close to the vacation homes of wealthy people boosted the quality of public schooling. The coastal county where I was raised is even wealthier and more populous now, but Florida’s rightward turn to school choice, along with a post-COVID crackdown on classroom curriculums that might be deemed “woke,” has left those same public schools poorer and its teachers less free to do their jobs. The state is currently in the midst of a property tax revolt that may further gut local school funding. A rabble-rousing, union-advocating teacher friend of mine came out of the same public schools as me, and she now teaches at a private school, primarily to pay for the discounted tuition her daughter receives.

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I’ll soon have skin in this debate myself. I’m expecting my first child at the end of this year, and if I didn’t live hundreds of miles away from Florida, I would be looking into the academies, charters and parochial schools that serve the county’s booming population of wealthy remote workers trying to pull the ladder up behind them. 

Living in New Orleans, I’m lucky in a way. My child will be born into a city that has no traditional public school system; New Orleans went all-charter in 2019. The scramble to get kids into the best schools is baked in, with parents entering their grade-schoolers into school choice lotteries with little regard to geography, making it unlikely that my child will go to a school that mirrors the demographics of our neighborhood. That decision was made for us years ago. While I believe that public education should be funded at the state level, with equal per-student distributions of tax dollars coming from the top, I won’t be required to back that belief in equality up with action any time soon.

Hannah-Jones’ experiment might be novel, but the fight that broke out around it is familiar. You can see it anytime an outwardly progressive politician or commentator benefits from their personal wealth. If you really believe that America is in the grips of a homelessness crisis, why haven’t you opened your own home to the down-on-their-luck? How can an elected official like Sen. Bernie Sanders push for affordable healthcare for all, while benefitting from the Cadillac health plans afforded to Congress? If you’re such a believer in public schools, why would you balk at sending your child to a failing and underfunded institution?

Such arguments are meant to pare down complicated, systemic issues into a series of individual choices. They may vary on the specifics, but the intent is the same. Critics of progressive policy pushers want activists to shut up about privilege because it makes them uncomfortable. Having to think about the advantages and disadvantages baked into the system strays too far from the preferred framework of school choice advocates and other conservatives — that all people are equally free to choose the life they lead, and that failure to wring a good education out of our flagging system is entirely the fault of the individual.

It’s not a frame that public school advocates, Medicare for All true-believers or affordable housing rabble-rousers need to accept. The gap between progressive beliefs and reality is right there in one of its oldest and most popular bits of sloganeering: Another world is possible. Admitting that it’s not here yet is the first step to fighting for it.

The post Wanting the best school for your kid doesn’t make you a hypocrite appeared first on Salon.com.

Blame Natalie Harp. On Friday, seemingly out of nowhere, Donald Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House after whining for the umpteenth time about “Fake News,” his decade-long catchphrase to demonize accurate but unflattering press coverage. (It remains unclear if the president, whose paternal grandfather was from Germany, knows the term is an English translation of the infamous Nazi term “lügenpresse.”) Trump has been complaining about the media’s insufficient reverence for him throughout his entire political career, but there seems to be no precipitating cause for this particular tantrum. To the contrary, POLITICO reported that “senior staff were surprised by the directive, which happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town.”

“You get sick of it,” was all Trump would offer in the way of explanation for his media ban. 

Soon, though, reports showed that it was likely a response to provocations from Trump’s aide, Natalie Harp. “Aide” is probably too generous a word for Harp’s job, which is reportedly to follow the president around and attempt to soothe him with an endless barrage of flattery from herself and with print-outs of his followers saying nice things about him online. Even though she recently wrote “I never want to bring you anything but joy” to the man she she calls her “Guardian and Protector,” it appears Harp is actually quite comfortable showing Trump materials guaranteed to hurt his notoriously fragile ego.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Harp “showed him clips of anchors on the cable network MS NOW criticizing his administration” on Friday, which sent the agitated president into “a fever pitch.” CNN followed up with a report that she also provided him with clips from CNN and POLITICO, resulting in a rage from Trump that led to an impulsive ban of the three outlets. 

Harp became famous earlier this summer, when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., mentioned in a campaign speech that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” on the new Air Force One than do his job as president. The White House responded with a five-alarm overreaction, a move that only served to draw more attention to his relationship with a woman that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has described as Trump’s “human binky.” At first, the relationship was mostly the source of mockery that someone of the his stature apparently needs a full-time ego masseuse who often totes around enormous bags, which have generated speculation about their contents. (Some have connected them, with no concrete evidence, to the strange shape of the president’s prominent posterior.) 

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This new wrinkle in the Harp story, though, suggests that she’s not just a human Band-Aid for Trump’s insecurities — she is actively dangerous. It’s unclear why she apparently showed the president clips that were guaranteed to anger him, but the result is that he launched the most serious assault in his ongoing war on the free press and the First Amendment. The episode shows that Harp isn’t just there to flatter and soothe Trump; she is also willing to get him worked up so that his terrible decision-making skills deteriorate even further. 

This move works out very nicely for Harp; it will almost certainly make Trump more dependent on her. She’s setting up a contrast for the praise-hungry Trump, between the “nasty” media that says stuff that offends his ego and what she has on offer as a lithe blonde exalting his magnificence. Plus, having had his feelings hurt by the press coverage, he’ll be even more eager for her services as a professional ego-fluffer. 

The situation is potentially dangerous for the country. As his press ban shows, Trump’s sense of entitlement and demands for adulation are getting worse, making him more prone to lash out at those he feels show insufficient deference. He also seems to feel less constrained by the law in exerting his power to punish those who aren’t sufficiently compliant, an attitude that goes beyond his outrage at the media. For months, Trump has been illegally withholding federal funds to states that didn’t vote for him. 

The president’s addiction to flattery has always made him vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors. But this appears to have increased during his second term. Nowhere is this more obvious than with his war in Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hawkish Republicans, led by the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, spent years trying to lure the U.S. into a war with the Islamic Republic. They were unsuccessful, never quite able to persuade past presidents, including Trump in  his first term, to ignore the military experts warning against taking action. But in February, Graham finally managed to get Trump over the line, appealing to his vanity by shamelessly comparing him to Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

This time, Trump’s demand for nothing but fawning coverage backfired. The major networks that comprise the White House press pool, including Fox News, responded to the media ban with a boycott. “Mr. Trump, for whom television is better than any narcotic, finds himself for the first time at least partially deprived of the major networks that have covered nearly every movement and utterance he has made for more than a decade,” wrote Peter Baker of the New York Times.

Deprived of his attention fix, the president visited New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion on Monday, crowing, “They never boycott me” and “Look at all that press,” ignoring the fact that they were there at the invitation of the popular Mamdani and not himself. In reality, the boycott has already resulted in one major humiliation for Trump. The president’s comments were inaudible during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his vaunted South Lawn helipad because his streaming team couldn’t get the sound working in the absence of CNN. 

Now the White House is attempting to salve the president’s wounded ego by launching “Trump TV,” which appears to be nothing more than a hasty rebranding of the existing in-house video team that livestreams events on social media. This is unlikely to quell Trump’s angst over losing the media coverage he himself banned, especially since the White House livestreams have already given his team headaches in the person of Aaron Rupar, the independent journalist who seizes opportunities to grab unflattering shots of the presidential backside.

Trump very obviously craves the validation that can only come from getting attention from major media outlets. While he may have a professional enabler in Harp, nothing can beat the narcissistic fix of national cable news coverage. Even she probably can’t keep him from soon rescinding the ban and recovering his access to those sweet, sweet cameras. 

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