Donald Trump Presidential Portraits — Side-by-side of Donald Trump's 2017 and 2025 official presidential portraits

Donald Trump Presidential Portraits

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Published August 12, 2026

Donald Trump Presidential Portraits refers to jokes and image macros comparing Trump's smiling 2017 official portrait to his moody, dimly lit 2025 inaugural portrait, which many viewers said looked more like a mugshot. The meme spread in mid-January 2025, spawning Fullmetal Alchemist edits, Seong Gi-hun comparisons, and companion jokes about J.D. Vance's portrait.

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Overview

Donald Trump Presidential Portraits, sometimes called Donald Trump's Official Portraits, is a cluster of jokes and edits reacting to the unsmiling, dramatically lit inaugural portrait of Donald Trump released ahead of his second swearing-in in January 20251. The image shows Trump staring into the camera with a cocked eyebrow and his face lit from below, a stark tonal shift from the smiling 2017 portrait taken during his first term1.

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Posters immediately started pairing the 2017 and 2025 shots side by side, treating the pair as a before-and-after gag about time, vibes, or life going sideways3. Others compared the new photo to Trump's August 2023 Fulton County mugshot, arguing the lighting and glare felt like the same energy3. A parallel meme wave hit Vice President J.D. Vance's official portrait, which showed him smiling with arms crossed and was quickly folded into the People with Blue Eyes format and various face-warping edits3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter / X (viral spread)
Creator
Trump-Vance Transition Team
Date
2025

The Trump-Vance Transition Team unveiled the official portraits of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance on January 16th, 2025, describing them in a statement as "Official Portraits Released, And They Go Hard"1. The transition team's statement, reported by Fox News, framed the shots as a preview of the January 20th inauguration1. AFpost had shared the Trump image on X late on January 15th, 2025, before the official rollout the following day2.

The first big viral post came from X user @TerminusVinter, who set the 2017 and 2025 portraits to the Fullmetal Alchemist ad-break audio, in which the anime title is announced first in an upbeat voice, then a deeper one2. That post pulled in more than 170,000 likes over two days and set the template for a wave of Fullmetal Alchemist title-card edits, including a January 16th version by @TBR55_Mistress that reached roughly 1.7 million views4.

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How It Spread

On January 16th, 2025, Redditor /u/jobomaja888 posted a side-by-side of the new portrait and Trump's August 2023 mugshot to r/pics with the caption, "Trump's official portrait, Is he just a caricature of himself now," and the thread cleared 48,000 upvotes5. Later the same day, Instagram page @usa_transportation reposted the 2017 vs 2025 comparison with a trucker caption, "Me trucking in 2020 / Me trucking in 2025," which picked up over 1,000 likes in about a day6.

The format kept branching into other meme templates. On January 16th, X user @creepydotorg mapped the two Trump portraits onto the Smiling and Unsmiling Seong Gi-hun format from Squid Game, drawing about 3,000 likes in a day7. A second Fullmetal Alchemist title-card edit by X user @untemi0 followed shortly after @TBR55_Mistress's version and cleared 5,000 likes in a similar window2.

J.D. Vance's portrait became its own subgenre almost immediately. A January 16th post by @massivecanine slotted Vance into the People with Blue Eyes meme and reached more than 200,000 likes in a day8, while @awshuqs posted a face-edited version exaggerating his features that hit roughly 66,000 likes in the same timeframe9.

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How to Use This Meme

The core template is a two-panel comparison: Trump's smiling 2017 portrait on one side, the moodier 2025 portrait on the other, with a caption framing the pair as a before-and-after joke about aging, jobs, moods, or life circumstances3. Common conventions include swapping the second image for the 2023 mugshot for a harsher read5, mapping the pair onto other two-panel meme formats like Smiling and Unsmiling Seong Gi-hun7, or setting the images to the Fullmetal Alchemist ad-break audio for a video version2. Vance-format edits typically keep his portrait and either apply a blue-eye overlay or push his features around with liquify tools8.

Frequently Asked Questions