After Donald Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury last week, it was natural to wonder whether the former president would get himself an Insta-famous mug shot like various ne’er-do-well celebrities (Frank Sinatra, Al Capone, Tupac) have before him. Unfortunately for those hoping Trump would get his close-up, Yahoo News reported Monday that he would not be getting cuffed, jailed, or photographed; as the New York Times noted Tuesday morning, prosecutors would require a mug shot only if Trump were at risk of fleeing the feds.
So there will be no Trump mug shots on T-shirts and dorm-room posters. Instead, the Trump campaign has already settled for doctoring a mug shot for fundraising purposes. The pic Trump’s team used is so clearly fake that, as Bloomberg’s Justin Sink noticed, the tee designer added a few inches to Trump’s height.
But as Trump puts on his political-martyr act, one image that emerged on Tuesday may end up serving the absent mug shot’s role. Around 1 p.m., reporters and camera crews flooded Trump Tower as the man himself emerged to head on over to Manhattan Criminal Court. While standing in front of the glitzy glass doors, he put up a fist, photos of which rocketed across news-photography wires and TV news. And Trump’s fans noticed. Here are a few examples I culled from Trump’s platform of choice, Truth Social, courtesy of loyalists like Kari Lake and Rep. Matt Gaetz:
Even the historical-photos account got in on it.
The fist came across as a signal of projected defiance—a message to the small groups of fans who’d congregated outside Trump Tower and the Manhattan courts, as well as a symbol that Trump acolytes could use to make this portrait the defining image of the whole affair. This was something that could counteract all the other photos of Trump being surrounded by cops and looking downcast while sitting in the courtroom. It was also an Easter egg for voters who’d witnessed Trump lift his fist time and again at campaign rallies and presidential speeches.
There’s an obvious parallel here with a particularly notorious fist-pump photo: the Jan. 6, 2021, image of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley raising his fist in solidarity with the aggrieved Trump die-hards who’d gathered outside the U.S. Capitol that morning. After that gathering escalated into a full-on insurrection, Hawley defended his gesture and affixed the photo onto pieces of merch for his 2024 reelection campaign, like coffee mugs. (He kept this up even after the copyright holder for the photo sent Hawley a cease and desist, and even after the Jan. 6 investigation committee released footage of Hawley sprinting away from the very rioters he’d help to inspire.)
It may seem odd that right-wingers like Hawley and Trump are so attached to this gesture, considering that the raised fist has its origins in militantly leftist movements. In 1848, artist Honoré Daumier completed a famous painting of a Frenchman raising his fist within a crowd, as a commemoration of the uprisings that had erupted that year to oust France’s last serving monarch. The gesture would gain international currency after the turn of the century: with American union leaders during the 1913 Paterson silk strike, with European anti-fascists in the 1930s, and with Black Power activists in the 1960s, following the lead of Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’ iconic salute at the 1968 Olympics.* Not exactly the type of politics that Hawley and Trump are into. Or Dinesh D’Souza, despite his “We shall overcome!” Truth Social caption.
Nevertheless, you can expect to see Trump’s own fist-pump photo permeate the right-wing mediasphere in the weeks to come, as his supporters try to spin a dire legal setback into an act of political bravery. Indeed, fists have a certain power. If only you could make them while being fingerprinted.
Correction, April 4, 2023: This piece originally misspelled Tommie Smith’s first name as Tommy Smith. This article also misstated the year of Smith’s and John Carlos’ iconic Olympic salute—it was 1968, not 1936.
