Trump’s Piercing Mugshot Making Him Money

This article was last updated on August 25, 2023

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The Historic Police Photo

The head tilted slightly towards the camera, the piercing gaze extending from under the bushy eyebrows and his mouth in a tight line against a neutral gray background. It is the photo with which former American president Donald Trump (77) will forever go down in the history books. Shortly after his formal detention at Georgia’s Fulton County Jail, authorities shared Trump’s police photo.

It was a historic moment. Never before has a so-called mug shot of a (former) president of the US been made. Only Ulysses S. Grant came close when he was arrested as president in 1872 for speeding his carriage through the streets of Washington.

Trump himself was one of the first to share the photo. In fact, he dedicated his first tweet since the storming of the Capitol more than two and a half years ago. He also immediately added a link to his website, where he calls for donations in a personal message.

The Power of Images

The former president knows the power of images, just like his campaign team: within no time, T-shirts, mugs and stickers with Trump’s mug shot could be ordered via the campaign website. It’s all to raise money for his campaign for next year’s presidential election.

Screenshot Mugshot products are already available on the internet, including a mugshot mug

Sean Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University, disagrees The New York Times that of the many millions of photos ever taken of Trump, the police photo may eventually become the most famous. “Or the most notorious.”

“Trump entered the grounds of one of the most notorious prisons in the US around 7:30 PM, prime time on US TV. So the contrast could hardly be greater. He was received in a dilapidated room. People who have been there before speak of leaking ceilings, peeling walls and a terrible stench. There he was treated like any other suspect. After twenty minutes he was outside again, but he had smelled prison life for the first time in his life. To close associates he would have said it was a horrible experience.”

The Symbolic Importance

For a long time, Trump managed to avoid a mugshot in the four cases that are now against him. In the first case in which he was charged with paying hush money to a porn actress, his lawyer said Trump had “the most famous face in the world” and therefore a police photo was not necessary. The authorities in Florida and Washington DC also saw no added value in such a photo, partly because Trump was not a flight risk.

American media emphasize that the police photo is important anyway, because it will probably symbolize all cases against Trump. Most voters won’t read the thousands of pages of charges against Trump, but they will all see the photo, writes The New York Times.

For his supporters, the mugshot is visible evidence of what they consider to be a politically motivated persecution. For his opponents, it is yet another confirmation of Trump’s unfitness for the presidency.

The mugshot will therefore probably not affect him politically, writes an American connoisseur in the British newspaper The Guardian, no matter how special the photo is. At most, it will reinforce polarized opinions about Trump.

The Role of Trump’s Image

The New York Times emphasizes that Trump himself has always been someone who cares about how he is portrayed. In the past, he regularly complained about how media used photos of him. In 2020, he responded to a widely shared photo showing his hair being lifted by the wind. According to Trump, that photo was “fake news” and photoshopped.

He may have planned how he looks on his mugshot, the newspaper writes. But how the photo turned out was determined by the authorities in Georgia. The place, the lighting, he was in no way able to influence that, emphasizes The New York Times.

Ann Hornaday, film and image expert at The Washington Post, analyzed Trump’s mug shot. According to her, the photo is strong because of its simplicity, dullness and lack of frills.

“Love Trump as someone who took American swagger, arrogance and impunity to new extremes or hate Trump as a one-man stress test of the country’s increasingly fragile norms, institutions and constitution,” she writes. According to her, his mugshot “keeps those divergent realities in an uneasy equilibrium”.