CNN reporter sneaks past Secret Service at Mar-a-Lago to take photo Donald Trump didn’t want

| 9:35 pm EDT March 18, 2017
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The journalists who travel with the president have had a rough time of it since Donald Trump took office. He’s routinely ditched the press pool. He once dragged them all the way to Mar-a-Lago in Florida just to leave them stranded in a room with the windows blacked out. But one CNN investigator has found a way to get a small measure of revenge, sneaking past Secret Service agents to take a photo in an area that Trump didn’t want photographed.

Nathaniel Meyersohn from CNN Investigations was among the press pool at Mar-a-Lago this weekend. Late on Saturday night he tweeted the following:

Meyersohn didn’t specifically state why the Secret Service had tried to keep him and other reporters from accessing the room where the painting in question is displayed. But Palmer Report did some research into its background. According to the site Hyperallergic, Donald Trump commissioned the painting from Ralph Wolfe Cowan in 1987 but then spent fifteen years feuding with him over it.

Cowan had made the artistic decision, common among oil sketches, to leave some details of Donald Trump’s left hand undefined in the painting. But Trump doesn’t seem to understand how art works, so he kept badgering Cowan to go back and fill in the hand – which he finally did, fifteen years. In other words, yet another instance of Trump being sensitive about how his (allegedly tiny) hands are portrayed.

In any case the CNN investigator’s decision to ignore the rules laid down by the Secret Service, and begin sneaking about Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for the sake of taking rogue selfies, points to the larger scheme of things. Trump has been demonizing, harassing, and lying about reporters from the start – and they’re increasingly no longer interested in playing by his rules. Contribute to Palmer Report