Donald Trump: The Mugshot, the Pose and the Posturing
New mugshot dropped!
When I saw Donald Trump’s mugshot for the first time, I felt a surge of exhilaration. It happened! It really, really happened! A man who was once president and could very easily become president again was being treated like the criminal he is, was, and always will be.
But I also had another, stranger response. I experienced a weird feeling of deja vu. I recognized Trump’s facial expression because it has also been my default facial expression while getting photographed.
You know the look. His head and chin are down. His eyebrows are furled in a look of intense concentration. He is very ostentatiously not smiling. He’s frowning as hard as it is possible to frown. If he were frowning any harder, his jaw would snap.
It’s a look that silently but incontrovertibly says, “I am a very serious man, as evidenced by my very serious expression, and it is the greatest injustice in the history of the universe that I had to even take a mugshot. It’s worse than anything that Jesus experienced on the cross while being crucified.”
I’ve glowered at cameras with that exact same expression through the decades because I am very insecure about the way that I look. I was worried that if I smiled, I would show the world gnarly, disgusting teeth and also look like a complete idiot who had no chin, just a neck that went all the way up to my face.
I didn’t want to look like an idiot by smiling, so I adopted an almost comically grim facial expression conveying only frustration and incoherent anger.
Trump similarly fears that if he were to smile in his mugshot, it would look womanly and insufficiently macho, and cultists who see the famously petty little bitch who loves drama as an exemplar of old-school masculinity would be disappointed.
The disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president wanted very badly to express strength, defiance, resilience, and the iron will of a warrior who can’t go to war because he, regrettably, has bone spurs.
I see something very different because I see myself in Trump’s mugshot as well as the NFT-and-golden-shoes pimping charlatan who has a disconcertingly large percentage of the American people under his spell.
I know that expression is not one of strength, bravery, and macho defiance but rather the flagrant insecurity of someone whose sense of masculinity is so fragile that it can be punctured by something like a goofy-looking or insufficiently macho photo.
I know that it’s the look of someone who thinks they’ll look dumb if they smile, so they frown as if in the final stage of a life-or-death frowning competition.
I was going to write this blog post when Trump’s mugshot dropped. I missed that window but I keep seeing Trump’s mugshot in pro-Trump circles.
It’s no coincidence that the very first thing Trump tweeted under Elon Musk’s rule was the mugshot.
That is because Donald Trump is PROUD of his mugshot. Donald Trump thinks his mugshot looks good. Whereas you and I might see getting arrested for all of the horrible crimes we’ve committed while holding ourselves up as the very personification of law and order as somehow a bad thing, Trump clearly sees getting busted as proof of his high-tech martyrdom.
Trump has raised untold millions off of that mugshot alone. To his fanbase, it’s the ultimate proof that he’s being crucified, just like Jesus, just because of all the immoral and illegal things he has done.
The mugshot isn’t the only place where Trump has celebrated rampant criminality. He has announced that he will pardon all of the Trump-worshipping patriots who tried to destroy Democracy on January 6th, 2021. He’s also said of the January 6th rioters, “Nobody’s been treated ever in history so badly as those people.”
This presumably includes slaves, Jews killed in the Holocaust, and Jesus Christ. Bad news, Jesus: your biggest fan and most loyal follower thinks that people jailed for taking part in a riot at the Capitol were treated worse than you.
Trump thinks that his mugshot makes him 2Pac or MLK but better because he’s white and racist. He thinks it makes him a badass. He thinks it makes him tough. For a man who has spent his adult life pretending to be a gangster it’s got to be validating on some level to have Johnny Law knocking on your door.
Beyond Trump’s literal pose there’s his tough guy posturing around the mugshot and his prosecution in general.
This posturing is even more ridiculous and transparent than his mugshot glare. Trump has been cosplaying as a tough guy all his adult life.
He’s soft as a peach and twice as sweet. Yet his cultists buy into his delusional sense of himself as a wrongly persecuted rebel standing up to a corrupt system for the people.
The closest Trump has come to being a macho man is dancing awkwardly to the Village People song of the same name, but that won’t keep him from pretending to be someone he most assuredly is not.
Subscribe to the EveryEpisodeEver newsletter here
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here