Donald Trump Has His Framed Mugshot Hanging In The White House

Aaron Ryan·
CULTURE
·
Donald Trump mugshot White House
@MargoMartin47

Pretty sure this is what you call a “power move.”

When President Donald Trump was elected for a second term during the 2024 presidential election, it made history in a lot of ways. Not only was Trump only the second president to ever be elected to two non-consecutive terms, after Grover Cleveland did it back in the late 1800s, but he was also the first president to be elected after having been convicted of a felony (or in Trump’s case, 34 of them).

After his first term, Trump obviously faced all kinds of legal trouble from prosecutors who were desperate to ever keep him from returning to office. The Manhattan District Attorney concocted a novel legal theory to charge him with 34 counts of falsifying business records, converting what would ordinarily be a misdemeanor into a felony because the statute of limitations had otherwise passed. And ultimately, the president was convicted on all 34 counts – which made his win in the 2024 election all the more unique.

But the New York case was far from the only prosecutorial warfare waged against Trump between his two terms. He was indicted in Florida by the Department of Justice for his alleged mishandling of classified records (the same crime that a special counsel said Biden committed but shouldn’t be prosecuted for because of his bad memory and “diminished faculties”). And he was indicted in Washington DC for his actions related to January 6, a case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court which ruled that presidents have immunity for “official acts” committed as president. Both of these cases were ultimately dismissed after Trump was re-elected.

And then there was the case in Georgia. In August 2023 (after he had announced his re-election campaign, which I’m sure is just a coincidence), Trump was indicted in Fulton County, Georgia on a slew of charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That case never went very far, mainly due to the conduct of District Attorney Fani Willis, who was ultimately disqualified from the case by the Georgia Court of Appeals.

But it also happens to be the only case where we got to see Donald Trump’s mugshot.

The now-iconic mugshot was taken at the Fulton County Jail on August 24, 2023 after Trump turned himself in on the Georgia charges. His supporters immediately began sharing the mugshot as a show of support, and Trump’s presidential campaign even began selling merchandise featuring the badass photo.

Well apparently Trump was such a fan of the photo that he decided to show it off once he returned to the White House.

Photos of a meeting in the Oval Office with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi were posted on Twitter, and eagle-eyed viewers quickly noticed that Trump had hung a framed photo of his mugshot in the White House, just outside of the Oval Office.

The photo appears to be a framed copy of the cover of the New York Post from back in August 2023 featuring the mugshot:

And folks on Twitter went wild over seeing the photo hanging outside the Oval Office:

You’ve gotta think that parading Trump into the jail for a mugshot is one of the biggest political miscalculations in a long time. There’s no doubt that prosecutors only did it, and then released the mugshot, in order to embarrass Trump and hurt his presidential campaign. And now that mugshot is hanging in the Oval Office.

Talk about backfiring on them.

A beer bottle on a dock

MORE FROM WHISKEY RIFF

WHISKEY RIFF RAFF PODCAST

WHISKEY RIFF SHOP

NEWSLETTER

ABOUT US

THE TEAM

STAY ENTERTAINED

A RIFF ON WHAT COUNTRY IS REALLY ABOUT

A beer bottle on a dock