Mugshots define eras.
Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age.
Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for “vulgar and indecent language”, spoke to the shock waves created by 1960s counterculture.
Now comes what Donald Trump Jr described as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics” before the booking picture of his father glaring into the camera was even taken. But whether deeply divided Americans view the first ever mugshot of a former president as that of a gangster or a rock star is very much in the politics of the beholder.
Trump’s hostility shines through as he turns his eyes up toward the camera above him and in his taut, downturned mouth as he is booked into the Fulton county jail on charges of trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, he makes no attempt to put on a smile like some of his co-defendants in their mugshots.
The picture does not flatter but it does convey the message many of Trump’s supporters want to hear – belligerence.
The six-pointed star of the Fulton county sheriff’s office badge and the name of the sheriff, Patrick Labat, sits in the top left hand corner of the picture. But some will be disappointed that Trump is not seen in the classic pose holding a board in front of his chest with his name and date of arrest.
Still, the mugshot will now enter the pantheon of famous-name booking photos, alongside Frank Sinatra looking unperturbed after his arrest in 1938 for “carrying on with a married woman”, and Hugh Grant after he was found with a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. Trump has some way to go to catch up with the American actor Lindsay Lohan’s eight-year run of mugshots for theft, drugs and driving offences.
The former president’s supporters are already embracing the booking photo as a badge of honour and defiance. It will be held up as evidence that their man will not give up the fight against a system his followers see as ever more determined to bring him down and prevent him returning to the White House.
Far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert led the way with a tweet proclaiming: “Not all heroes wear capes.”
The president’s detractors, on the other hand, will see the booking photo as evidence that even a man who was once the most powerful person in the land cannot escape the might of the justice system. Some will welcome anything that makes him look even a little bit more criminal as a confirmation that sooner or later he is going to prison. The accused may be presumed innocent until a plea or a jury says otherwise but mugshots can have a way of conveying guilt.
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For Trump though, the picture is likely to prove yet another money spinner. Within hours, his campaign fundraising website was advertising T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs glorifying a martyred Trump with the booking photo above the words “never surrender!”. Sales are likely to be brisk given the enthusiasm with which the former president’s supporters now treat each public humiliation as an accomplishment.
Two impeachments and four sets of indictments, from financial fraud to a slew of charges over the 2020 election, have done little to damage Trump’s standing among the true believers, and have only bolstered his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Such is the strength of that belief that a recent CBS poll showed Trump voters trust him more than their own family members and religious leaders.
Ordinary Americans have already got creative in response to the flood of indictments by mocking up pictures of the former president in an orange jump suit a la Guantánamo prison and in printing T-shirts with Trump in various states of detention with slogans declaring “Trumped up charges”, “Guilty AF”, “Guilty of winning” and “Legend”.
There will be plenty who will challenge Don Jr’s claim that the mugshot has instantly become the most iconic photo in US political history. Pictures of John F Kennedy’s assassination or Martin Luther King Jr leading the march for freedom or a host of other historic moments will surely prove more enduring.
But as with the gangsters and rock stars, Trump’s booking photo may come to define an era – one of unusual political turmoil that has yet to resolve whether his next mugshot is as an inmate.