We do not know if Donald Trump’s hairdresser and makeup artists blow-dried and primped the former US president on his flight from Mar-a-Lago to Atlanta, but it seems likely. By the time he surrendered at Fulton, like that other fading star Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, Trump was ready for his close-up. The celebrity mugshot, after all, is more about performance art and political statement than mere police documentation.
Trump makes the best of what he has. Or his people do. Is it possible they brokered a deal with the sheriff to change the wattage of the overhead lightbulb to make it less harsh? Boldly leaning forward so we can study his thatch, and see where toupee ends and pate begins, it’s a performance that perhaps, like his hairpiece, is poised to become unstuck. The red-rimmed eyes suggest tiredness. Perhaps – let me dream – he’s been crying over his comeuppance. And the sternness of the expression seems almost self-satirising.
Trump’s gaze seems risible precisely because he is trying so hard to look serious. In this, he’s channelling the spirits of long-dead virtuosos of the mugshot. In Stalin’s, from 1911, we see the tousle-haired revolutionary arrested by Tsarist police for fomenting unrest. His stare – like Trump’s but more calm and scornful – suggests the establishment has no authority over him. In Martin Luther King’s 1956 mugshot, taken after his arrest during bus boycotts, he stares back at the cops who booked him, and by extension white America, with a hint of scorn and rage but with dignity nonetheless.
Trump could do with a little of that dignity in his self-righteous fury. Yet King’s dignity is beyond Trump – and nor can the ex-president look quite as scary as Stalin. At least he was able to avoid the rookie mistakes made by, for example, wild-haired James Brown caught unawares. Trump, for all his shortcomings, isn’t naive enough to let himself be captured for posterity like that.
Instead, he quotes from mugshot history. Yet, for all that it is a performance, Trump is no Cindy Sherman role-playing magnificently for the camera. The problem is he just isn’t very good at all this. Glaring crossly beneath arched eyebrows as if staring down a flunky who’s served up a cold burger, Trump looks as out of his element as the constipated Duke of Wellington in the portrait by Goya. He may be aiming for the moral uprightness of Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia, yet he looks as pompous and silly as Stephen Fry playing General Melchett in Blackadder.
As a work of art, it’s not clear what the photographer’s role here is, but it’s hard not to think whoever pushed the button intended to make the sitter look ridiculous. If so, well done: this anonymous artist has made the once most powerful man in the world look like a foolish old duffer with anger issues rather than a serious presidential contender.
The sitter’s role here is to wrest control of his image from the plod snapper, but Trump hasn’t got the chutzpah. When Jane Fonda was busted on trumped-up charges of drug smuggling in 1970, she appeared holding a clenched fist aloft, glaring. Trump, unable to master the simplicity and power of that pose, looks what Fonda doesn’t – laughable.
Clearly Trump thinks the image will help the brand and, by extension, his bid to become president once more. The pose Trump has struck is, to be fair, honoured by history, which teaches: “Don’t be a mug and smile.” Go for passport photo solemnity, but with added gravitas. These truths were recognised by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon when he invented, or rather standardised, the mugshot in 1888. But they were ignored by some of the worst criminals in history.
The American mafia gangster John Gotti grins foolishly for his 1990 mugshot, while drug lord Pablo Escobar leers. The expression on Al Capone’s face says: “How could a chubby-baby-faced poppet like me be guilty of anything, least of all tax fraud?” It also says that he ain’t intimidated by no cop. Paris Hilton smirks imperiously, after being arrested in Vegas in 2010, as if to say to whomever is taking her picture: “Really?”( or perhaps: “Rilly?)
The only smiling mugshot that does its subject any favours is the one of Bill Gates in Albuquerque in 1977, for driving without a license and running a stop sign. His geeky grin rhymes with his terrible glasses – all fitting emblems for the nerd who, a year later, moved his startup company Microsoft to Seattle and conquered the world.
Two of Trump’s 18 co-defendants didn’t get the no-smiles memo. His former lawyer Jenna Ellis grins broadly, as does David Shafer, former chairman of the Georgia Republican party. At best, their poses suggest they’re playing innocent, but it comes across in both cases as witlessness in the face of quite serious indictments. To be fair, neither seem quite so criminal as another of the co-accused, Rudy Giuliani, who looks as if he’s just come off set as the Joker after shooting a scene in which Batman finally sees him off.
The trick of the mugshot, which Trump realises, is to look as though you’re 100% not guilty. Indeed, the mugshot must be understood not as shaming moment but as opportunity for promotion. Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra are outliers in this respect. Arrested for amphetamine possession in 1967, Jagger more or less wittingly used the mugshot as an opportunity to present his incredibly fetching pouting lips, hollowed cheeks and general aura of bad-boy sexiness, all commensurate with his band’s image.
Yet at the same time, Jagger’s mugshot also served as a depiction of youthful vulnerability. Indeed, busted on dodgy drugs charges, Jagger managed to gain the support of William Rees-Mogg, who wrote a leader for the Times under the headline “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?”, indicting those who were indicting and saying they were in the wrong, not lovely Mick. And so it proved: Mick got the charges overturned on appeal.
Similarly, when Sinatra was busted in 1938 for “seduction”, his mugshot showed a transgressive bad boy with eyes you could write poetry about. At least until you read the FBI report, which asserts that “under the promise of marriage” Sinatra “did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant, who was then and there a single female of good repute”.
No celebrity mugshot, though, can match in adorableness those taken by Holly Hunter, playing a cop in the 1987 film Raising Arizona, shooting recidivist Nicolas Cage. “Turn to the right!” shouts Hunter as she takes his mugshot. “You’re a flower, you are,” replies Cage, already in love. “Just a little desert flower.” That, to be sure, is not really in the Trump playbook.
