Split Screen: A Year Since Trump 2.0

Images of what we’ve lost — and what we’ve gained.

One year ago today, I woke up as an employee of the United States government – but only until 12:00 p.m. sharp. Much of the day remains a blur, but, because I am a cinematographer, some images remain crystal clear. To avoid the traffic and arrive by our 5:30 a.m. call time, two colleagues and I walked a mile that dark, snowy, freezing-cold morning to the White House. As a drunk man in a Trump hat heckled us, I recalled the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates: “For eight years, Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell.”

Slipping on literal ice as I walked, I steadied myself — physically and emotionally — to film the peaceful transfer of power and wondered how America had fallen.

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Since 2022, I had the honor and privilege of serving as the official videographer and director of video to Vice President Kamala Harris in the White House. Every single day, my White House-issued Sony FX3 camera and I had a mission: to frame her with the dignity and authority she deserves. To show America what a woman standing behind the vice-presidential podium looks like. To show all of us what is possible when the arc of history bends toward racial and gender equality.

After the election, though it was hard to show up to work, I felt my mission ever more viscerally. During the last three weeks of the Biden-Harris administration, I filmed vice presidential business as usual. I filmed her walking over to certify the election. I filmed Harris signing the vice president’s desk, the first woman whose signature lives there. I filmed briefings on the devastating wildfires in California, holding the camera as unflinchingly as Harris’ gaze, even as she described the fires inching toward her Los Angeles home.

I watched as her office was cleared out, slowly then quickly: gone were the Thurgood Marshall portrait, the photograph of Amelia Boynton being carried away on Bloody Sunday. Gone were the biographies of Rosa Parks and Constance Baker Motley.

I wondered: Whose portraits will hang in this office now? Whose biographies will rest on the shelf? Who will be invited to sit in this historic place and tell their story to our highest leaders, the country, and the world? I thought of the people and conversations I had filmed in that office, like shooting survivors and abortion providers, or the little girls she took the time with to show them that they, too, could sit behind that storied desk.

And then, unavoidably, Jan. 20 arrived. I took one last walk through the West Wing, looking at the Rose Garden (my heart breaks to write this, knowing now that it’s been destroyed). I walked up the stairs toward the Oval Office and saw the bust of President Abraham Lincoln being carried out by a young man in uniform. It felt like a metaphor.

As the motorcades started to arrive, I waited outside with icy fingers, camera ready for the time-honored tradition of the first and second families greeting each other and posing for a portrait on the steps. I remember JD Vance started moving up the steps as soon as he got out of the car, ready for his closeup. My eyes had been trained on Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who gently gestured to Vance to wait for his wife, Usha.

I remember Vance shaking Emhoff’s hand first, not Harris’. To me, this moment summed it all up. Harris had broken the second-highest glass ceiling in American politics — and nearly the first — but it struck me that in the eyes of “traditional Christian family values” Vance, it seemed like she was first and foremost a man’s wife. Protocol is essential in this job, and someone should have briefed him. But it’s telling how his instinct kicked in. As someone who studies how sexist portrayals of women affect our perception of female leadership, this small moment arguably foreshadowed the cultural direction the Trump-Vance administration would take.

In this frame, millions of people saw on Day One what we lost: respect for women’s hard-earned right to lead. In Trump’s America, the men will always have the upper hand.

Later that day, we all watched as the American oligarchy was granted front-row seats at the inauguration. The boy’s club of American business included Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Tim Cook, among others. This image is a snapshot of the decades-long fight by Republicans to slash government regulation of the wealthiest. A loss of our republic to the 1%. To the men in charge, accompanied by their wives.

The next image, of a handmade sign lamenting the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development, serves as another example of what we’ve lost in this first year of Trump. Shuttering the international aid organization was one of the first and most shocking acts of Trump 2.0, but this image of a DIY sign and bouquet also tells another story: the willingness of everyday people to stand up for what they believe in.

This next image shows the locations of No King’s Day protests, and to me, this is an image of something we’ve gained this year. Though it is a dire situation for our democracy, let us not forget how many people have organized, attended, and shared images of protest. We’ve gained solidarity and purpose together.

This over-the-shoulder image captured by photographer Fibonacci Blue this weekend in Minneapolis simply portrays a powerful message. A protester, in a coat and gloves, holds up a cardboard sign against a cold Minnesota sky. The low angle frames the sign so the viewer’s eye is drawn to the message. We must remember that every unjust action by this administration has been met — and will continue to be met — with resistance from communities across our country.

I wanted to close out with an image to honor Vice President Harris. An image from exactly a year ago that sums up both what we lost and what we gained.

For her last flight on Air Force 2, she requested an all-female flight crew. As I stood there filming, my fingers burning from the cold wind, the engine roaring, I saw her shake hands and salute each member of the crew, one by one. I saw a group of women dedicated to serving their country saluting a woman vice president for the first—and certainly not the last—time. I saw how we’d lost a fearless leader for our vice president, but we gained an image of unflinching grace and kindness. On what must have been among the hardest days of her life, she chose to uplift women.

We have lost so much this year, and we will continue to lose more for the next three years of this awful administration. But we cannot lose our hope that the arc of history is long, and it’s up to us to keep bending it toward justice.

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Send your examples of visual evidence of what has changed to submit@contrariannews.org with the subject line SPLIT SCREEN.
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Azza Cohen (she/her) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who served as Vice President Kamala Harris’s official videographer in the White House. She recently founded a production company with her wife, Kathleen, and is writing a book about visual sexism from a cinematographer’s perspective. Uncover and address visual sexism alongside Azza every other week here on The Contrarian and on Instagram and Bluesky. The New Yorker distributed her film “FLOAT!” in 2023.

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