Nice and sunny this late afternoon Friday here in California’s Central Valley — weather-wise a most-pleasant way to end the work week.

Unpleasant, however, is this ugly, nefarious mug that has washed across the InterWebs today:

(Image found here.)

In US history there’s never been a president like the T-Rump’s time in office, and there’s never been a former president like his ass either — so far, four criminal indictments, a shitload of other legal cases pending, and a life that may (hopefully) will include jail time. As a man without any noticeable traits of any kind of good, T-Rump embraces the dark life story of himself as a whine master, a tough guy from a near-comical role as the villain. Yet he is the villain and in a real, touchable way. He’s freaking really, really bad, and embraces the villain’s role.
As grasped in that mug shot, the glare of hatred and vengeance and the scowl of nasty, back-stabbing retribution upon everyone not beholding to him. And for the supposed humiliation the mud-shot/booking crawls up his majestic dignity. He’s a fairy-tale douchebag who in reality is a cowering coward. And from all of history, there migt not be a more-worse human being. And that’s saying a shitload.

Soullessness in those eyes, not a speck of gray matter in any form of spirit beyond that twisted glare of a face consumed by self, and self-warmongering of no one is better at everything than the T-Rump, hence the self-centered call to superpowers in everything as only ‘“…I alone can fix it.”‘
Yet he hasn’t enough sense to come out of the rain, or not stare into the sun during an eclipse.

The mug face above is a forewarning of the terrible possibilities if T-Rump is re-elected in November 2024 (or really, any Republican as they’re all in the cruel, surreal hellhole together). Due to the really, really bad nature of the T-Rump and corresponding political party, or a political-edged cult maybe, that freaked face is a horror of a future.

Even within the mug-shot terrain, T-Rump brings out the worst:

Stupidest time to be alive. https://t.co/0l4SuMlbLe

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) August 25, 2023

And in time, even worse than histiry.
In fact, Stuart Jeffries at the Guardian this afternoon has a good take on celebrity police/jail mug shots, from Martin Luther King’s carrying a ‘hint of scorn and rage but with dignity nonetheless‘ (1956); while mafia gangster John Gotti just ‘grins foolishly‘ (1990); or to Paris Hilton, who looks of herself and ‘smirks imperiously’ (2010) for her booking photo, they all seemed to have control of their situations despite the situation
Jeffries makes note of a difference:

As a work of art, it’s not clear what the photographer’s role here is, but it’s hard not to think whoever pushed the button intended to make the sitter look ridiculous. If so, well done: this anonymous artist has made the once most powerful man in the world look like a foolish old duffer with anger issues rather than a serious presidential contender.

The sitter’s role here is to wrest control of his image from the plod snapper, but Trump hasn’t got the chutzpah. When Jane Fonda was busted on trumped-up charges of drug smuggling in 1970, she appeared holding a clenched fist aloft, glaring. Trump, unable to master the simplicity and power of that pose, looks what Fonda doesn’t – laughable.

Yeah, it could possibly be ‘laughable‘ and this particular view of his asshole mug could show that, if not, however, for the underlying terrible, frightening reality — T-Rump is a dangerous psychopath without a hint of empathy at all and a callus disregard for life forms, human, animal or whatever.

And worse maybe, there are those pieces-of-shit supporting actors/actresses in this horrid tale of idiotic insanity, with a middle-school pulp fiction of criminal intentions. Amanda Marcotte at Salon, also this afternoon, takes a mug-shot look at the mixed-fertilizer bag of defendants indicted down in Georgia — all assholes for in-your-face grifting:

For most people, being arrested on organized crime charges would be a low moment, but Trump and his alleged co-conspirators are leaning into it. They’ve all tried to strike poses meant to be menacing or carefree in their mug shots, and have celebrated their walks of shame on social media. Sadly, this makes sense. As I’ve written before, MAGA leaders self-consciously identify as villains, from the way they dress to the bad-guy rhetoric they employ. Trump’s “I am your retribution” speech, for instance, gave of strong “wishes he were Tom Hardy playing Bane in a Batman movie” vibes. The Georgia 19 are, for the most part, pampered country-club types, but play-acting as fictitious master criminals is an excellent chance to fundraise by burnishing their malevolent image with the MAGA faithful.

Unsurprisingly, Trump used the moment to return to Twitter. With his usual delusional grandiosity, he declared, “NEVER SURRENDER” over a photo taken on the day that he, um, surrendered.

A friend of mine who’s a critic often tells me that he tries not to assess a film or theater performance through the lens of his own personal taste. Instead, he asks what the creators were trying to accomplish and whether they met their own goals. That view shapes the tawdry task of reviewing the mug shots of the Five-Iron Cartel. The five-point scale I’m using here is not a measure of their moral worth, which is zeroes across the board. Our task here is to rate how well the members of the Trump cartel struck their poses of cartoonish evil.

And Marcotte rates them, too — T-Rump: ‘Even one point out of five may seem generous, but at least he managed not to smear his makeup on his collar. No doubt Trump thinks the photo is “perfect” and “beautiful.” He also listed his height at 6’3″ and his weight at 215 pounds, another reminder that there’s no limit to his delusional self-assessment.‘

Rudy Giuliani: ‘The owner of a Manhattan apartment you can have for a cool $6.5 million turned in the most satisfying mug shot — at least for those of us who long to see the insurrectionists pay for their misdeeds. Rudy’s not even trying for that “eff you, liberals” vibe that most of the geniuses behind the Country Club Coup are aiming for. He just looks like a beatdown dog.‘

Good read.

Mugged, or not, yet once again here we are…