When does it end?
Even now that Donald Trump has been arrested four times on ninety-one felony counts and is just about a lock to be convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life, we still have to hear narratives on TV and Twitter about how Trump is supposedly a step ahead of us. The latest narrative was about how Trump wanted his mugshot to happen, so he could use it to his advantage. As it turns out, this narrative is 100% fictional.
Turns out Trump fought hard to avoid having to sit for a mugshot. He and his attorneys spent weeks trying to find some legal maneuvering that would allow Trump to avoid a mugshot in Fulton County, according to The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell. Not only did Trump fail in that effort, it means that every hot take we’ve heard on this has been total nonsense.
So much for the notion that this was all some grand master plan on Trump’s part. So much for all the talk we’re hearing about Trump having wanted a mugshot so he could use it to fundraise and look tough. So much for all the stories about how Trump had been saving his return to Twitter until he was able to get a mugshot he could use for it. None of those things happened.
Here’s what we now know actually happened. Trump desperately tried to avoid sitting for a mugshot, because (for obvious reasons) no political candidate could ever possibly benefit from having a mugshot. After he got saddled with a mugshot, he then tried to make the best of a bad situation by playing into it with a tweet and a fundraising link.
But if Trump had his way, there would have been no mugshot to begin with. So anything that he subsequently did with that mugshot can not be seen as some master plan on his part. It’s nothing more than an attempt at mitigating the damage that he knows is being done to him.
Moreover, it’s not at all surprising to learn that Trump failed in his attempt at keeping the mugshot from happening. All Trump does these days is fail. He desperately tried to keep himself from getting indicted to begin with, and he failed at that. He tried to keep people like the Mar-a-Lago maintenance guy from flipping on him, and he failed at that.
Donald Trump does not have magical powers. Nothing is going the way he’s been trying to make it go. Yet every time something goes wrong for him, and then he turns around on social media and feebly claims that he wanted it that way, the majority of the media and pundit class starts playing right into it for effect.
It’s time we all acknowledge that Trump doesn’t have anything going for him. Nothing is playing out the way he’s been trying to make it play out. He is not carrying out some secret evil genius master plan where he’s making a point of getting indicted and arrested and mugshotted so he can magically ride those things back into power.
Even if this were Trump’s strategy, it wouldn’t work – for reasons that are rather obvious. Simply put, this isn’t some fictional movie where you can keep digging yourself an even deeper hole until you magically end up on top. In the real world, the more the deck is stacked against you, the more thoroughly you lose. At the end of a movie, luck turns in someone’s favor simply because the plot needs it to. But that’s not how things work in the real world.
And now we know that this isn’t even Trump’s strategy to begin with. It turns out that even he understands that things like getting arrested and criminally charged and photographed for a mugshot are in fact a bad thing for political figures. The question is when we’re going to stop listening to the folks out there who keep disingenuously insisting, for the sole purpose of drawing attention to themselves, that Trump still somehow has us right where he wants us.
