A mug shot will turn Trump’s legal peril into his greatest possible political weapon
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Former President Donald Trump elected to skip the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, and frankly, nobody missed him. Without the elephant in the room, a relatively lean gang of eight spent two hours sparring over the worst inflation in 40 years, how to navigate geopolitical tensions with Russia and China, abortion, education, and basically every issue other than what Trump cares about: the 2020 election and himself.
So, after such an unforced error from the former president, there’s a poignant and painful irony in the fact that liberal prosecutors down in Fulton County are about to hand Trump not just the single most compelling advertisement of his campaign but perhaps the most valuable image in the history of paid politics.
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I’m talking, of course, about Trump’s mug shot.
Liberals and libertarians have spent years criticizing the laws governing mug shots, and for good reason. In many jurisdictions, mug shots must be made public, meaning that without being convicted of a crime, a person’s visage is imprinted at the moment of their arrest, for the public’s consumption, forever. Thanks to the internet, a suspect eventually exonerated of an accusation from when he was a teenager may spend the rest of his life losing crucial career advancement because his mug shot appears at the top of his Google Image search.
But let us ignore the civil-libertarian legal argument against mug shots. Let’s not even focus on the minutiae of Georgia’s guidance on the matter. Let us, from a purely pragmatic sense, game out the following: If you were a liberal prosecutor hellbent on ending Trump’s career as the former (and possibly future) leader of the free world, why would you want to deliver him the most iconic campaign poster in political history?
Already, Fulton County has released a slew of mug shots from Trump’s indicted co-conspirators. They’re ill-lit and frankly induce more pity than rage or fear.
But Trump was a showman before he was a politician, and even while governing the largest economy on the planet, Trump was known to call media personalities occasionally to offer unsolicited advice about camera angles, lighting, and posing. Trump may not prefer to pore over white papers, but you’d have to be an imbecile to believe that Trump hasn’t been studying the most iconic mug shots in history with the precision of a surgeon.
Need proof? Here’s Robert Barnes, a Trump backer who made $100,000 betting on the president’s election in 2016. In other words, this is what the people who have a financial stake in the president’s success understand.
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis wants us to believe that her criminal investigation isn’t political, and she’s likely told herself that refusing to bend the rules to spare Trump a mug shot is further evidence of her conviction. But in practice, she’s handing Trump the greatest weapon any politician could ever ask for.
Trump may be no Martin Luther King Jr., but King didn’t have the internet. Half the country may refuse to believe that Trump is the victim of anything, let alone the state, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Even Barack Obama had to commission and pay for the iconic “Hope” poster that came to define his presidency. Willis seems keen to hand Trump an even more iconic tableau, and she’s doing it for free.