The great cognitive flip that occurred in the hours after Donald Trump’s mugshot – by some accounts, as carefully stage-managed as any media photocall – was released into the world is symptomatic of everything that Naomi Klein explores in her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
The mugshot, taken in Fulton County, Georgia, the state where Trump is facing 13 charges including forgery and racketeering, among others, was meant to be an artefact of the law, a visible sign of his surrender to the legal process. More than that, mugshots have long carried a weight of shame, particularly for those in the public eye, and many on the political left had hoped that Trump’s would be irrefutable evidence of the shame he’s brought on himself and on the hallowed office he once held.
