Delivering a speech in Atlanta last month, Jon Ossoff accused Donald Trump of corruption, incompetence and fecklessness, and peppered his remarks with substantive observations of dates and times and places. But the comment that ricocheted across the internet – a clip of just a few seconds – was an almost-throwaway reference about how the US president wants to “travel with Natalie” onboard Air Force One. The crowd cheered the US senator, who is running for re-election in battleground Georgia and is increasingly seen as a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2028.
But his target audience that day – and this year – spanned far beyond the concert hall. After his remark went viral, stories about Trump’s young, exceptionally devoted, presidential aide Natalie Harp rippled through social and established media. Often enough, they were accompanied by an image of Ossoff, his sharp jawline captured from below as he looks into the middle distance.
This photographic framing has increasingly been referred to as the “Ossoff angle”, perhaps in a disservice to myriad politicians from John F Kennedy to Barack Obama who also employed the technique, snapped at a low angle from a camera pit over the past century. While the approach is not new, it has helped the senator for Georgia to reach the social media feeds of users far beyond his state. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communication at Penn’s Annenberg School, likened Ossoff to Kennedy.
The first millennial senator has mastered the medium of the moment, she suggested, much as Kennedy was the first president who really understood television. Because you can’t just stand up and say, ‘This is a new generation of leadership.’ “You have to have people draw that conclusion about you. And part of the way you do that is you master the media of the time, and you demonstrate that in the process you have leadership capacity and that you have the capacity to deal with the old order.” At 33 years, 11 months and four days, Ossoff was the youngest US senator sworn into the 117th Congress.
At 39 today, and ever so slightly gray at the temple, he remains the youngest in a chamber with an average age of 65. The value of good lighting, a good background and a good angle in a social media post is not lost on a film-maker, as Ossoff was before turning to public office. The former documentarian has a knack for winning the algorithm with plain language, surfacing absurdities in an era of absurdities.
While Trump is also a master of social media, the effect is different. His audience is generationally different. Trump, who regularly attaches infantile nicknames to his political enemies as a political marketing gimmick, calls Ossoff “Pee-wee Herman”, a tepid sobriquet which hasn’t yet landed.
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