Donald Trump could soon have a startling new campaign poster: his police mugshot. I wouldn’t put it past him. He has already been boasting to confidants that he wants a “perp walk” – the public parade of a defendant in handcuffs, usually a badge of shame. Alternatively, he may decide on a dramatic showdown with the forces of law and order by refusing to leave his compound at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, protected by a rebel horde of MAGA-loving extremists.
In practice Trump may slip into the back entrance of a New York police station for his compulsory fingerprinting and headshot. Yet however privately alarmed he feels about being the first former American president in history to face criminal charges, he is bound to make the most of his latest brush with infamy. The case is sensational. His nemesis, porn star Stormy Daniels, has claimed with all the subtlety of a Carry On film, “I’m giving him a ride straight to jail,” but for Trump, it is yet more evidence that there is a mighty establishment witch-hunt against him.
