Donald Trump: the Derek Zoolander of American politics?

In Trump & Me, an expanded 2016 re-issue of a lengthy 1997 New Yorker profile, author Mark Singer describes a journey he made with his preposterously coiffed subject on his preposterously coiffed subject’s lavish private jet.

Fellow passengers included Trump’s then 13-year-old son, Eric, and one Ghislaine Maxwell. Destination? Mar-a-Lago, the Florida hotel complex Trump owns and which at the time counted Maxwell’s partner and fellow Palm Beach resident Jeffrey Epstein among its members.

Of course there’s no such thing as a free ride, so in return for their passage the jet’s gilded occupants were made to watch Trump’s favourite movie. Eric was stationed by the video player to fast-forward through the boring bits (titles, establishing shots, expository dialogue, artful montages etc.) And the film? Bloodsport, a violent martial arts flick starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. So not too much in the way of expository dialogue or artful montages, I would imagine.

Cut to August 2023 and I do wonder if Trump has a new favourite film – Zoolander, the cult fashion satire. Both he and Melania have cameos in it, so it would figure. And it certainly looks as if he has been practising Blue Steel, the intense facial pose of sucked in cheeks and pursed lips which is the calling card of fading catwalk star Derek Zoolander, played in the film by Ben Stiller.

I mean, how else do you explain that mugshot?

Or perhaps I’m reading too much into the image taken at Fulton County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday after Trump ‘surrendered’ and was ‘booked’ at Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, before being released on bail of $200,000 (£160,000).

Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking, a sort of coping mechanism on my part. One meant to undercut the seriousness of the fact that America’s next President may well be a four-times indicted, one time arrested and (possibly) imprisoned former one.

If you haven’t seen the mugshot, it shows Trump with his head tilted slightly downwards, his jaw clenched, his lips pursed. He’s leaning to the left, which is hilarious when you consider his politics, and giving the camera a most intense stare. It’s a combination of Elvis straining on the bog just seconds before the moment of expiration, and the look Paddington gives Mr Brown when he leaves crumbs in the marmalade.

Interestingly, Singer’s New Yorker colleague David Remnick describes Trump giving exactly that same look during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he came under sustained assault from then-President Barack Obama. Remnick was a couple of tables away, so had a bird’s eye view. Trump wasn’t happy. Cue glare. That, Remnick thinks, was the moment Trump decided he was going to run for the White House one day. Cheers, Barack.

And now we have the same look on a mugshot, though not because Trump is on the end of a comedy roasting. It’s a little more serious than that – the not-so-small matter of a legal case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

She contends that Trump attempted to subvert the will of the Georgia voters in a bid to keep Joe Biden out of the White House, and has slapped him with a racketeering charge under the Racketeer and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. It’s more often used to nab mafia bosses, the sort of characters well used to having their picture taken by an officer of the law.

“I took a mugshot,” Trump said afterwards, in an interview with something called Newsmax. “I’d never heard the words mugshot. They didn’t teach me that at the Wharton School of Finance.”

As an aside, they didn’t seem to teach anything at all at the Donald Trump University, established in 2005 and itself the subject of a RICO lawsuit in 2013. That one was settled out of court by Trump for $25 million just days after he was elected president in 2016. This one won’t be so easy to wriggle out of.

Given that the Democrats won the election and Trump still maintains it was rigged, there’s probably a Blue Steal gag to be made at this point. But I’ll spare you. Instead, let’s return to the world of mugshots.

Trump supporters in Georgia. Note Trump In Orange Prison Jumpsuit t-shirt (Image: AP)

They say there’s an art to them. “Don’t smile. A smile will make it look too arrogant,” says Cooper Lawrence, author of Celebritocracy, a book on celebrity culture. “You want to smirk like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton do. A smirk says: ‘Yes, this sucks, but I’m going to be fine.’”

Trump didn’t smirk but not because he didn’t study Ms Lawrence’s mugshot playbook. He had plenty of time to think about it and to practice his Blue Steel look. And he had reason enough to make it good: he knew full well the image would be on the front page of every newspaper in the world within hours of being taken, as well as on myriad Trump 2024 fundraising websites and all manner of merchandise.

Eric Trump, he of on-board video player operating fame, has already weaponised it by tweeting it to his 4.2 million followers. The Trump re-election campaign is also making hay – or, more precisely, t-shirts. Donate $47 to the campaign and they’ll send you a free one with the mugshot image on it and the slogan Never Surrender (curious, as that’s exactly what Trump had to do in order to have the picture taken in the first place).

In that sense Trump was lucky because practice and preparation aren’t luxuries afforded most people who are arrested and dragged in front of a camera.

Website The Smoking Gun has been in operation since 1997, the year Singer’s article on Trump was published. It contains a variety of leaked documents such as backstage riders (Ozzy Osbourne demands peppermint tea, bagels and skinned and sliced papaya, apparently). But it specialises in mugshots.

It’s a glorious rabbit hole to dive down if you have a spare hour. Look, there’s Nick Nolte in a Hawaiian shirt, hair sticking up all over the place, p**** as a newt following his arrest for drunk driving. Look, there’s a grinning Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, just about visible through huge beard and even huger hairdo, cuffed following a 1970 drug bust at a New Orleans motel. Look, there’s a 51-year-old Daryl Hannah, star of Splash! and Blade Runner, lifted for lying down in front of a bulldozer to protest at the building of an oil pipeline (go Daryl!).

Lindsay Lohan basically has a sub-section all to herself thanks to her – count ’em – six separate mugshots.

At the rate he’s going, Donald Trump may soon catch Li-Lo. Not that it matters if he does. There is, tragically, nothing to stop him running the country from a prison cell, though his use of Airforce One and its onboard collection of JCVD flicks will be somewhat limited. Which is why I like to imagine him channelling Ben Stiller-as-Derek Zoolander doing Blue Steel. It helps me sleep at night.

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