Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Who Has The Most Menacing Mugshot Of Them All?

By Hal Brown

Featuring the grift from the goon with the gargantuan girth and the grim gaze (bottom of page)

Who knew that you could get a mirror from Wayfair with Trump's image on the top?

I agree with Robert Reich when he writes in his Raw Story article: Donald Trump: The fascist who doesn’t want America to think:

Here is Trump’s mug shot from his arraignment yesterday in Georgia. It’s a look of defiance — which I’m sure he practiced repeatedly beforehand — intended to make his supporters and his Republican base feel defiant, too.

I wrote yesterday in The Meshugana Mug Shot Megillah:

 In her wanting to treat Donald Trump just like another other arrestee at the Fulton County Jail Fani Willis managed to help him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by requiring that his mug shot be taken. She also gave him a parade led by what at my attempt to count them was about 20 blue lights flashing motorcycle officers. 

The sun hasn't even come up this morning here in Oregon and this is what I see on TV:

MSNBC is calling the booking photo the MAGA mugshot.

While Trump is grifting off the mugshot it is also fodder for cartoonists turning it against him, for example these published in The Columbus Dispatch.

According to reports (reference), at first Trump didn't want a mugshot taken but once he realized he couldn't avoid this he decided to make the most of it. 

Despite all of his bravado and using his Georgia mugshot to rope in more supporters to send him donations, Donald Trump tried in vain to get his lawyers to block having the humiliating picture taken and disseminated to the public.

He certainly did. For example as decribed in this article in The Guardian:

Excerpt:

Following Donald Trump’s surrender at the Fulton county jail on Thursday evening, the highly anticipated mugshot of the former president spread swiftly across the internet as both ends of the political spectrum raced to commodify and meme-ify the picture.

The Trump 2024 campaign was quick to print the president’s hostile glare on to merchandise including mugs, coolers and premium cotton shirts ranging from small to 2XL. Accompanying all the new mugshot merchandise, which also included a 4in x 4in vinyl bumper sticker, were the words: “NEVER SURRENDER!”

The face of the first former American president to sit for a mugshot also found itself on shot glasses being sold by the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group.

For $15, customers can purchase a glass with Trump’s mugshot. On the back is “FAFO”, the acronym for “Fuck Around and Find Out”. The Lincoln Project also offered a combo deal, for those looking to purchase glasses featuring co-conspirators John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mark Meadows, all of whom had their photos taken at the Atlanta jail this week.

To save you from clicking on a Trump website:

This is from Donald Trump, Jr. on X formerly known as Twitter:

The Lincoln Project is making the most of the mugshots:

Click to enlarge above images

The only loss for Trump about his booking is that he didn't get away with lieing about his height and weight. As I wrote yesterday even the Murdoch NY Post noted that there was no way he really was as tall and weighed as little as he said he did. 

The eyes don't lie about the BMI. His is at least a level 3 which comes under morbid obesity.

I wonder if Trump wears a girdle to hide his frontal heft. If he does I don't think there's a similar device to hide his ample posteria. If there are photos I bet Trump would like to have forever erased they are these:

I share them now because they never get old.

Addendum 1: Maureen Down's NY Times (subscription) has a clever title and telling photoshop illustration:

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — If there were any justice in the world, Donald Trump would have taken the Mug Shot of Dorian Gray.

As with Oscar Wilde’s charismatic and amoral narcissist, the Picture of Donald Trump should have been a “foul parody,” a reflection of what the chancer has done with his life. It should have shown Trump’s corroding soul rather than his truculent face.

It should have revealed a man so cynical and depraved that he is willing to smash our nation’s soul — our democracy — and destroy faith in our institutions. All this simply to avoid being called a loser.

“Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away,” Wilde wrote of Dorian’s portrait. “The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.”

Now that would have been some primo merch: Trump slapping a rotting mug shot on a mug and selling it on his campaign website for the low, low price of $25.

Trump has long felt that squinting or scowling is a good look for him. Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer, recalled that Trump once told him that Clint Eastwood was the greatest movie star ever, and O’Brien believed that Donald and Melania modeled their squints on Eastwood’s. 

Dowd also had the same idea about the mirror s I did:

He no doubt workshopped his stroppy mug-shot look in front of the mirror, trying to convey “Never surrender!” as he was literally surrendering. 

Her last sentence:

As Audrey Hepburn said in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” after she tangled with the law, “There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion.”

Addendum 2:

More of the grift from the goon with the gargantuan girth and the grim gaze:

Click images to enlarge - will not go to Trump website

You know he posed for this one:

Addendum 3: President Biden got the last word... of lierally the last and best four words.

Joe Biden's 4-Word Reaction To Donald Trump's Mug Shot Is Dripping With Shade

Or maybe it was a sincere compliment. (Probably not.)

Addendum 4:

Jen Psaki: Trump's mugshot will come back to bite him in 2024

Some of the images posted in comments to this article. Mine is of his face on a urinal drain splash cover:

Click images to enlarge.

The Meshugana Mug Shot Megillah

 

Translation from Yiddish:
The Meshugana Mug Shot Megillah

My original title:

Megalomanic Makes the Most of his Mug Shot and how Murdoch's NY Post nails Trump for lying about weight and height at indictment in top website story.

In her wanting to treat Donald Trump just like another other arrestee at the Fulton County Jail Fani Willis managed to help him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by requiring that his mug shot be taken. She also gave him a parade led by what at my attempt to count them was about 20 blue lights flashing motorcycle officers. 

I haven't seen that many big bikes since I drove to Oregon from Massachusetts and stopped to stay overnight by chance in Elko, Nevada during their annual motorcycle jamboree (below)

A lot is being made in the media about Trump lieing about his height and weight. This was the top of the website story in Murdoch's New York Post:

Click above to read article

By Hal Brown

Heres another Fox News story:

Click to read

The Trump mug shot has dominated the news to such an extent that it already has a detailed Wikipedia entry (here in three parts, click each to enlarge):

It's noteworthy that Wikipedia has pages devoted to discussion as to whether this subject even deserves suhc a distinction saying that the case for this is the the photo will surely becone iconic. 

Articles for deletion/Mug shot of Donald Trump

and

Talk:Mug shot of Donald Trump

I thought we'd finally find out whether or not Trump met the medical definition of being morbidly obese after he was arrested at the Fulton County Jail. I know it is usual for those who are arrested to have their height and weight recorded. 

Morpid obesity is now called class III obesity and is defined as follows:

Class III obesity, formerly known as morbid obesity, is a complex chronic disease in which a person has a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or higher or a BMI of 35 or higher and is experiencing obesity-related health conditions. The BMI scale is not always accurate, so healthcare providers may use other tests and tools to assess obesity, such as measuring waist circumference.

Class III obesity can contribute to the development of several serious health conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The good news is that class III obesity is manageable and treatable. Reference

It was not to be. The authorities allowed him to report his own height and weight.

Former President Donald Trump lost 25 pounds — and gained an inch of height — since April, according to jail records filed Thursday after he surrendered to Fulton County authorities on charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

The 77-year-old’s measurements, which were pre-reported, according to ABC News, indicate that Trump is 215 pounds with a height of 6’3″ —25 pounds lighter and 1 inch taller than when he was booked in Manhattan in April. NY Post article

I found the fact that The New York Post, at least at 5:00 EST, had this as their top story on their website. The article includes several incredulus and sarcastic tweets and comments about this lie and concludes:

“So, he’s lost 25 pounds since he was president is what we are understanding,” CNN host Jake Tapper said, “because he was, I believe, Dr. Ronny Jackson said he weighed something like 242 for his official physical, which people at the time were skeptical of that number.”

Trump’s final physical exam as president, conducted in June of 2020, measured him to be 244 pounds and  6’3’’ tall. Based on body mass index, those measurements would put him in the clinically obese category.

The late night edition of the paper features a full page image of his mug shot. Notable there is the line under the photo with the word "glowers" used to decribe how he looked: "Trump glowers in the first mug shot ever taken of a former president after he was arrested on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 George election."

Click above to enlarge

Did he glower or "strike a glowering pose" that he'd rehearsed in font of a mirror? What's your guess? He knew that the photo would be a big money raiser for him and be use on a wide variety of merch. Do you think he'd just not make sure he was camera ready?

The only glitch in the plan was he didn't prepare for the glaring lighting, possibly a flash, that made his face appear washed out and almost cartoonish.

This is how The Washngton Post decribed the photo in the article 

"Trump’s mug shot is perfectly on brand The former president’s booking photo serves as an official portrait" by their chief film critic:

Once the image was released shortly after Trump’s exit from the jail, it seemed to be mostly of a piece with those of Trump’s rogues’ gallery of co-defendants: banal, badly lit, with the harsh flatness of a drugstore passport snapshot. Dressed in a blue suit with his usual red tie and posed against a gray backdrop, a sullen Trump went with the scowl, glaring up at the camera with beetle-browed fury in a weird mash-up of the 0.5 selfie aesthetic and “Wanted: Dead or Alive” classicism. In the upper left corner, the Fulton County sheriff’s watermark provided the only authorial signature on an otherwise featureless piece of dispiriting iconography.

Trump lied saying he never heard the word mug shot (now universally understood to refer to a booking photo) when speaking before he left Atlanta. He said never heard the words at the Wharton School of Finance. It's impossible anyone who watches as much TV as he does never to have heard  mug shot. As usual he touted going to the presigious Wharton School of Finance at the Ivy Leage University of Pennsylvania. In fact this is a prestigious graduate school and Trump only was an undergradutate transfer student from Fordham there getting a bachelors degree in economics. This is a far cry from getting a graduate MBA degree at one of the top business school in the country. 

For more about this exaggeration read this article:

The Murdoch owned Fox News website had the story about his height and weight this morning but in a less prominent position. Fox News highlighted the mug shot story on the top of their website calling it the "mug shot drama".

Click about to read article about Trump's weight

Less sensational media aren't featuring stories as prominently ahout Trump's mug shot and how he is trying to sell merch with.

The New York City tabloid competing on the newstands and in the kiosks in the anti-Trump Daily News. This is their overnight front page. It also features the mug shot but makes a strong editorial comment.

The New York Tmes had a story about the mug shot but far down their main page:

Click to read (subscription)

Excerpt: As soon as it was taken, it became the de facto picture of the year. A historic image that will be seared into the public record and referred to for perpetuity — the first mug shot of an American president, taken by the Fulton County, Ga., Sheriff’s Office after Donald J. Trump’s fourth indictment. Though because it is also the only mug shot, it may be representative of all of the charges.

As such, it is also a symbol of either equality under the law or the abuse of it — the ultimate memento of a norm-shattering presidency and this social-media-obsessed, factionalized age.

“It’s dramatically unprecedented,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “Of all the millions, maybe billions of photos taken of Donald Trump, this could stand as the most famous. Or notorious.” It is possible, he added, that in the future the mug shot will seem the ultimate bookend to a political arc in the United States that began decades ago, with Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.

The only glower that came near to Trump's for gloweryness was Rudy's:

Jenna Ellis looked like she was posing for the high school yearbook photo she missed since she and her two brothers were homeschooled by their parents (Reference):

More of the photos and various ways each person tried to pose:

Read the HUFFPOST article about each of the people pictured above.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who will have the most famous mug shot of them all?

Click to enlarge

Addendum:

Whether Trump's Twitter (X) return was a triumph or a twizzler tease reamins to be seen. No doubt he'll have a bigger audience than he had on Truth Social. It will open him to having less than lauditory replies posted in atrticles like this one from HUFFPOST:

Trump's First Tweet In Years Is Being Mocked For 1 Truly Awkward Mistake

The former president returned to the platform for the first time since he was banned in January 2021.

I never joined Truth Social (it requires an email and phone number) so now I can post my own replies to what Trump puts on social media - maybe some will be republished.

Now we are learning that

Trump shakes up potential Truth Social merger with return to ex-Twitter...

I like that term ex-Twitter, aka known as X Twitter. Stay turned...

Moscow murders make Milwaukee murders look lame: Putinym Вот что будет, если трахаться с Путиным

 

If you don't read Russian you'll have to read the blog to get the translation 
of my title above.

By Hal Brown

By the time I finished watching the season two finale of "Only Murder  in the Building" (see yesterday's blog: Murders in Milwaukee vs. Murders In The Building: What I'll Be Watching Tonight) and turned on the news I learned that when it came to making the news with a dramatic story Putin had won the night.

As you can see from the screen grab of the BBC website above the presumed Putin Prigozhin assassination bumped the GOP debate and Trump's legal troubles off as the top story. I think this is indicatve of the international perspective of what is the most improtant news to cover.

Fox News, in contrast, relegated the story to a minor spot:

The New York Times prioritized the debate story online...

... but dropped it to the very bottom of the print edition front page:

Click above to enlarge image

The Washington did the same with their online and their print editions:

I undertand why local media puts American news on as the top story but I think the Russia story is equally important, an opinion reflected by the editors of the print edtion of The NY Times.

Anyway you look at it, there were two major stories last night.

The plane being shot down came with an amazing video which makes it a compelling story for television.

Click above to view with real life commentary

The caught on video amazing assassination - although one is foolish to be amazed by it - came before the debate and was referred to when Nikki Haley accused Ramaswarmy of "choosing a murderer" for saying supporting Ukraine is not a "priority for the United States."

From the debate:

“Look what Putin did today, he killed Prigozhin,” Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s former governor said Wednesday night during the first Republican party presidential candidate for the 2024 election after being asked how she would respond to the war in Ukraine if she were elected. 

She continued, “When I was at the U.N., the Russian ambassador suddenly died. This guy is a murderer. And you are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.” Reference.

From HUFFPOST

 U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley landed perhaps the biggest blow against Ramaswamy during a heated exchange over aid to Ukraine. Ramaswamy argued that U.S. support for Ukraine against Russian aggression should be used for defending the U.S. border instead.

“You are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country. ... You would make America less safe. You have no foreign policy experience and it shows. It shows,” Haley said, drawing an eruption of applause from the debate audience. 

The broadside is the closest Haley has come to a breakout moment during the race so far. The former South Carolina governor has struggled to gain traction in early nominating states.

In terms of sheer drama a group of GOP president wannabes shouting over each other watching a plane carrying 10 people presumably including the leader of the Wagner Group and his chief deputy being blown out of the sky and crashing and burning (see more video and photos on Newsweek here) was literally a murder in Moscow (literally somewhere 30 minutes north of Moscow on its way to St. Petersburg).

Not only is this being reported as a murder in Moscow but there is also a possible mystery in Moscow because there are some questions being asked whether Prigozhin himself staged this assassination so he could disappear and live out his life in some safe haven. 

If he managed to do this Putin could probably find him and get rid of him for sheer vengeance but he wouldn't be able to make it public. Although the psychopath would like to look Prigozhin in the eyes telling him that vot chto sluchilos', kogda ty trakhalsya Putinym as he shot or poisoned him he'd have to settle for a live video.

Either way it's a win for Putin. He shows that anyone who dares staging a coup against him is signing their own death warrant and will be subject to a public execution. In fact, this is what it was called on MSNBC's Morning Joe just after I typed these words. They added that it seems more than a coincidence that someone was their to take a video of it as if it was staged for television.

The candidates merely metaphorically murdered, or attempted to murder each other. There was, or might have been, a real murder which demonstrates why President Biden's firm support of Ukraine is vital to democracy.

Ironically, while none of the GOP candidates in the debate won the night it is fair to say that both Biden (thanks to Putin) and Putin himself, albeit in very different ways, can claim to have come out victorious.

Addendum:

I am hearing comments on MSNBC saying that the timing of the crash might be relevant in that it came exactly two months after Prigozhin moved his troops towards the Kremlin. I would suggest that while Putin wanted to "celebrate" the two month anniversary he also might have wanted to provide must-see American counter programming to the GOP debate. If Trump thought his own Tucker interview would be good counter-programming, Putin certainly outdid him.

Afternoon update: 

As far as news: on The Washington Post website the Russia story is on the top of the page, the pending Trump arrest second, and the debate third: