AnalysisDonald Trump makes history with scowling jailhouse mugshot
- A stern-looking Donald Trump posed for a mugshot as he surrendered inside an Atlanta jail on Georgia 2020 election charges
- His mugshot picture, the first for a former US president, could become the most famous booking photo in American history
A camera clicks. In a fraction of a second, the shutter opens and then closes, freezing forever the image in front of it.
When the camera shutter blinked inside a jail in downtown Atlanta on Thursday, it both created and documented a tiny inflection point in American life.
Captured for posterity, there was a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, under arrest and captured in the sort of frame more commonly associated with drug dealers or drunken drivers. The trappings of power gone, for that split second.
Left behind: an enduring image that will appear in history books long after Donald Trump is gone.
“It will be forever part of the iconography of being alive in this time,” said Marty Kaplan, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications.