The performative mugshot
You’re a superstar
Yes, that’s what you are, you know it
Come on vogue
— Madonna
Most mugshots look pretty rough. The arrestee has generally been picked up drunk or high or having been in a fight or right after the cops have put knots on his or her head . . . or a combination of the above. Often enough, he or she is scared shitless, sick, and under-slept. Sometimes the shots are pissed off and defiant, and yet still reflective of the inner feelings (or in the case of performative masculinity, insecurities) of the subject. Mugshots were once a simple record, an image taken for identification. In our image-obsessed period — when the still image has become like the old Madonna music video . . . strike a pose — mugshots are another image management opportunity.
Posing is how we remake ourselves into fraudulent symbols, avatars, as Eliot’s “gestures without motion.”
The Donald Trump mugshot was calculated, by the carnival barker himself, as an avatar for his fan base. Its strange attractor has always been a kind of belligerent performative masculinity. True, he looks stupid, like a 77-year-old toddler whose been put in time-out; but only to those who’ve seen through his shtick. To his fans and to his most obsessive enemies, his mirror-rehearsed scowl will be pregnant with import, a threat either inflammatory or frightening. Fight for Trump, or fight Trump . . . but fergodsake we gotta fight!
What I see is a little boy, a bully-brat schooled by a scurrilous slumlord father. Trump has long lost any capacity for reflection. He’s an old man trapped the assertion of some deluded version of himself. Tough guy, manly-man, his many images written like “blank checks against eternity” as he approaches his inevitable end. When he was last knocked down, after a new President was sworn in, he had cards made for his fans with himself as Superman, his inflatable lizard-throat disappeared, age lines gone, his soft bloated body hardened and ripped.
Now that a judge has prohibited him engaging in witness intimidation, he’s sporting a mafia don pose. “If you come after me, I’ll come after you.”
With what, Donnie? A golf club? A bottle of Ensure?
Ray Smith attempts the menacing mugshot (above), but he pulls it off even less successfully than the orange man with the shiny comb-over. When you look at the old mugshots of genuinely scary people, they’re surprisingly normal. Timothy McVeigh looks like a local farmer. Ted Bundy could double as a furniture salesman. Stalin puts one in mind of a pizza chef. Salvatore Riina seems like a dissipated insurance agent. Elizabeth Volkenrath resembles a hairdresser (which is what she was before she became a sadistic guard in a death camp).
Donald Trump’s mugshot just makes him look silly.
There’s no need for an effort of morbid imagination to pierce past the banality of his image — as there is with a Bundy or Volkenrath — and see as through a glass darkly the unsettling and human-all-too-human disposition of some deep depravity. Trump’s image is analog, simplistic, a caricature, the pure performance of a man who’s had other people wipe his ass for him his whole pampered life.
He’s depraved, of course, but he’s a garden variety narcissist — caught out now by his schemes and his reliance on crazy people who stroked his ego. The absolute worst selection criteria for “advisors,” but then he never wanted advice. He thinks he has all the answers. He’s Dunning-Kruger on Big Macs and testosterone injections. He got away with what he did as long as he did because, in the United States there are no adults left in the room.
His loyal popular base are mental children; his all-things-Trump opposition are mental children; the whole culture is puerile, incapable of either taking responsibility or discerning the difference between image and substance. Politics is pure image management now, our “leaders” empty vessels. The Trump-or-die crowd (my God, that’s sad!) are already buying “never surrender” merchandise with the mugshot, which Trump had prepared for in advance. His defense bills are stacking up.
We don’t say much these days about masculinity as a political force, but performative “conquest” masculinity is deep in the heart of politics.
I remember the Bush II years like they were yesterday, when a Harvard legacy admit cosplayed a cowboy in the wake of the 9–11 attacks and steered the nation into more than two decades of disastrous multi-trillion dollar wars. There were two images that predominated on the airwaves after September 11, 2001. One of them was the hypnotically controlled and uniform repetition of the film clips of aircraft crashing into the buildings and the billowing erasure of the Manhattan skyline. The other was the authoritative father. He was everywhere, in every guise, embodied not only in George W. Bush but also in a surfeit of self-anointed “terrorism experts,” and in the ubiquitous big-dick posturing by male politicians and reporters. The whole nation was being carried along on a narrative straight out of the male revenge fantasy. The state of emergency obliged the women and children to figuratively cringe in the background, while the martial warrior-father prepared to unleash his pure, supra-rational masculine energy on the evildoers. The nation became the family, and its preservation depended upon the restoration of absolute authority to the tough white father.
Now the fear and anger are directed no longer at Muslims but at migrants, “the woke,” Antifa . . . Trump played to several sectors . . . or just “the system,” which however poorly understood had actually and is actually failing us. The angry Man, the assertive performance, corresponds vaguely with some magical aptitude for rescue and redemption. It’s no accident that Trump’s base tends white, tends older, and tends male. Among the not-white and the not-old, there is a marked male majority. Among the not-male, there is an obvious affinity for the phallocentric “God, guts, and guns” performance underwritten by exurban white racial paranoia and a fondness for internet conspiracy theories.
Don’t get me wrong. Even though Trump is a feeble fuck and most of his base are deluded fantasy obsessives; and even though the feeble-minded Democratic establishment is still “running against Trump” as both strategy and a cover story for their mis-governance; the evidence — and there is plenty of it — says he is guilty as hell of the many charges now leveled against him. I want him prosecuted, convicted, and jailed. They could have knocked him out of office when he was President if they’d have gone after emoluments (illegally and personally profiting through one’s public office) instead of Maddow conspiracy theories about Russia . . . but no one in Washington will touch emoluments with a barge pole, because the majority of them are guilty of it themselves.
There’s zero danger of a “civil war” if Trump is convicted and jailed, something he’d like to signal with his “war-face” mugshot, because actual war requires planning and execution, not the performative pose.