How Donald Trump's mug shot became a defiant and divisive 2024 symbol – The Washington Post
CONWAY, S.C. — After Quinzell Williams stepped out of an Uber near a campaign rally featuring Donald Trump, a passing couple did a double take.
“Aren’t you embarrassed to be wearing that?” they asked, Williams recalled.
He was wearing a T-shirt with Donald Trump’s mug shot from Fulton County, Ga., plastered across the front.
“No, no, no, no,” he replied that day in February. “Wearing it with pride.”
The mug shot, which the jail released last August after prosecutors charged Trump with illegally conspiring to overturn his 2020 election defeat in Georgia, has become an iconic image for the former president’s supporters. They don T-shirts displaying Trump’s scowl. They’ve purchased mugs and can coolers from the Trump campaign promoting the photo. Some of the merchandise is rendered in the same colorized style as Barack Obama’s iconic HOPE emblem from 2008.
To many of them, the mug shot has become a symbol of defiance — the same backlash to the prosecutions that Trump portrays as politicized, helping him consolidate support in the Republican primary. In addition to the Georgia case, Trump has been charged in New York with falsifying records to allegedly cover up a hush money payment to an adult-film actress; in Washington with interfering with the 2020 election results; and in Florida with mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice, totaling 88 counts across four cases.
“Wearing the shirt is a middle finger to all the indictments,” said Orlando Perez, a mechanical engineering student who got one at the Florida Republican Party’s convention. “We can see through all the indictments thrown his way, the lies and the BS. It’s making him stronger.”
To some Trump critics, the photo is a disturbing encapsulation of alleged behavior they find revolting — and it’s fueled worries about the prospect of a second Trump term. On the campaign trail, Trump continues to promote false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him, as efforts to reverse his defeat are being litigated in court. He has sought to discredit judges, often without evidence for his claims. Trump’s own advisers privately concede that the indictments could harm him in the general election.
“We need to step back a bit and clear our eyes from the fog from what Trump is putting out there and recognize he’s no different from any other criminal defendant,” said Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chairman who has become a vocal Trump critic. “In a general election it becomes more difficult because as we’ve already seen in primaries so far, independents and more centrist voters don’t appreciate it and are in many cases repulsed by it.”
The New York criminal trial is set to begin on April 15, the first for a former president. Trump has featured his legal problems prominently in his campaign, putting the Georgia mug shot at the center of his efforts. Shortly after authorities took the photo, he promoted it on social media, emblazoned with the caption “NEVER SURRENDER.” It generated the campaign’s best day for online fundraising, according to advisers, and continues to be the top seller in the campaign’s online merchandise store.
Beyond the Trump campaign’s official swag, the mug shot has proliferated on beanies and trucker hats, gold coins, trading cards and souvenir $2 bills. There are mug shot buttons and shirts that say “WANTED for a second term” and “WANTED by the FBI for Making America Great Again” or “NOTORIOUS DJT.”
In December, collecttrumpcards.com, which sells Trump digital trading cards, promoted a “Mugshot Edition” NFT set. A select group willing to buy 100 digital trading cards were offered limited edition physical trading cards, one with “a piece of President Trump’s Suit from the MugShot” and another with “a piece of the Suit and Tie,” the website said.
One attendee at the rally in Conway, S.C., added “Not Guilty” to his shirt on his own. At the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington earlier this year, a Trump supporter on the mezzanine of the Gaylord National Resort lobby unfurled a giant mug shot banner, prompting a chant of “USA! USA!” On March 7, Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.) wore a mug shot T-shirt under a blazer and an American flag bow tie to the State of the Union address.
“President Trump’s mug shot serves as a reminder to the American people that Joe Biden is weaponizing our Justice Department against his opponent, and that despite enduring these unprecedented political attacks, President Trump continues to fight to secure our border, rebuild our economy, and end the chaos that Biden’s weakness has created around the world,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman.
A special counsel acting independently of the White House brought the two federal cases against Trump. Local authorities brought two of the cases against him with no evidence they coordinated.
The political effect of prosecutions on the general election in November is not clear. A February Reuters-Ipsos poll found 55 percent of Americans saying they would not vote for Trump in 2024 if he is convicted of a felony crime by a jury. A Yahoo-YouGov poll conducted in March found registered voters splitting 43 percent for Trump to 41 percent for Biden, but when asked how they would vote if Trump were convicted of a serious crime, Biden had a 45 percent to 40 percent edge.
Polling expert Mark Blumenthal cautioned that hypotheticals are not always predictive; in 1998 and 1999, Americans said they would be more supportive of Bill Clinton resigning if the House voted to impeach him, but support for impeaching Clinton did not increase after they did so.
Earlier this year, Trump suggested that Black voters liked him because of his indictments and his mug shot, remarks that drew condemnation from groups such as the NAACP for playing on stereotypes labeling Black people as criminals.
Mitchell Stephens, a professor emeritus of journalism at New York University, said the mug shot photo illustrated Trump’s ability to capitalize on a negative event.
“If Donald Trump has a political skill, it’s in taking obvious areas in which he has done a terrible job and in which he’s done wrong things and trying to twist them into positive things for his audience, for his followers who seem to enjoy his defiance,” Stephens said. “It’s a pretty good example of that.”
While Trump’s New York trial is set to start soon, the timing of others is still uncertain. The Washington trial is on hold while the Supreme Court considers Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution for actions taken as president. Judge Aileen M. Cannon originally scheduled the Florida trial to begin in May, but that is all but certain to be pushed back. The Fulton County prosecution was held up by misconduct allegations against District Attorney Fani T. Willis that resulted in the special prosecutor she appointed leaving the case.
“He’s already said he’s going to spend most of this year in a courtroom not on a campaign trail,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s last remaining GOP rival said at a Dallas rally in February before she exited the presidential race. “That’s not a way you win.”
The first arraignment, in New York in April, did not produce a publicly available mug shot, but swag stands at Trump rallies and Republican confabs were already hawking shirts and signs and magnets with Trump’s face superimposed on a ruler, inconsistently marking his height (as he has over the years) as 6 feet, 3 inches, 6-4 or even 6-5.
Without public mug shots in the Washington or Florida cases, the Fulton County case ended up the first to include one. As Trump’s co-defendants started reporting to the jail for booking, the images of their faces over the sheriff’s office backdrop went viral on social media. Former Georgia GOP chair David Shafer, who was indicted as a co-conspirator and pleaded not guilty, made his mug shot his profile picture on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. Others, including Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign operative, raised money off his mug shot — he has collected about $62,000 for his legal defense fund.
Brian Robinson, a Georgia-based GOP consultant, compared the reaction to the mug shot photo to when Hillary Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.”
“All of a sudden you had people wearing T-shirts saying ‘I’m a deplorable.’ It’s a way of mocking your detractors,” he said.
Trump’s staffers began delighting in the mug shots as soon as they started appearing for co-defendants, including sharing a meme of the photos styled as Halloween costumes. After security guards at the first Republican primary debate made fliers with headshots of Trump staffers who were not to be admitted to the spin room because their candidate was not participating in the debates, the staffers made their own parody mug shots by superimposing those photos onto the Fulton County jail backdrop.
When asked in August about Trump’s mug shot, President Biden said he saw it on television. “Handsome guy. Wonderful guy,” he added sarcastically.
Trump was determined to get his own mug shot exactly right, advisers said, and has told others, “You only get one shot,” and, “You don’t get to take it again.”
The mechanics were challenging because the photograph is taken from above, on only a moment’s notice. As soon as he went inside the jail last August, hoaxes started circulating online. Finally, the real image showed Trump in his signature blue suit, white shirt and red tie, scowling at the camera.
He and his advisers felt he had nailed it.
The mug shot shirt has become a staple of Trump’s campaign events. One T-shirt buyer in Iowa received detailed care instructions to preserve it: wash inside-out cold with gentle detergent, line dry. Some Trump supporters said they saved the mug shot shirt specially for his rallies, while others said they’d sport it in nonpolitical settings, including church.
David Cast, who came to Greensboro, N.C., to sell Trump merchandise outside a Trump rally this year, called the Trump mug shot shirt “an icon” and “a piece of art history.”
“To be honest with you, it’s one of the best-selling shirts,” he said. “They usually sell out at every rally.”
Jon Bottorff, owner of Black Dog Printing in Richmond, Ind., described his company as “left-leaning” and said he wanted to print Trump’s mug shot as soon as it came out. He estimated that he sold roughly 50 shirts.
“We were like ‘Hell yeah, this dude’s finally, you know, have to deal with some of the consequences of his actions,” Bottorff said. “The right side kind of used the mug shot as like a rallying cry … I don’t really get that, because it’s like dude he turned himself in. They’re like, you know, ‘Never surrender’ or something like that. It’s like he turned himself in, though, like he surrendered.”
For many of Trump’s backers, it’s a sign of solidarity with the former president.
“The shirt stands for all the different things that the Democrats are trying to do to this country,” Ronald Colaresi, 71, said at Trump’s rally in Conway. “I saved it for today to wear it. This is the second time.”
He added, “I wore it the day I bought it, I just put it right on.”
Scott Clement, Dylan Wells and Perry Stein contributed to this report.
Top photos credits: Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, Nic Antaya, and Jabin Botsford.
Story editing by Sean Sullivan. Copy editing by Phil Lueck. Video by Jorge Ribas. Design and development by Courtney Beesch and Jake Crump. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Photo editing by Christine T. Nguyen and Natalia Jiménez.
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