August 26, 2023

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: