One of the hottest topics regarding Donald Trump's arraignment Tuesday in the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan is the former president's mug shot.
Although opponents to Trump's bid for a second term as president in 2024 could use the booking photograph in their attempts to thwart his campaign, it actually could raise more money for him than any marketing executive ever dreamed.
"President Trump and his supporters know the mug shot sums up the witch-hunt against Mr. Trump and is emblematic of everything that is wrong with the banana republic that [President Joe] Biden's America has become," said Toni Holt Kramer, a longtime Trump friend and founder of Trumpettes USA, according to The Daily Mail. "President Trump knows his mug shot will become the most famous mug shot ever in the history of the world.
"It's something that will become symbolic of the left's attack on Trump and any attempt to use it to humiliate him will backfire spectacularly. Everyone is going to want it. Even his detractors."
Trump has reportedly raised $7 million in campaign funds since news of his indictment Thursday on charges involving a $130,000 payment former Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid to porn actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep her quiet about an alleged affair in 2006. More money could flow in should his campaign use the mug shot on items such as coffee mugs, posters, flags, hats, and T-shirts.
Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, author of "Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law," told Newsmax on Saturday he told the president the previous day the mug shot could bring a financial windfall to his campaign.
"You all remember when Frank Sinatra had a mug shot [after a 1938 arrest on a morals charge]?" Dershowitz said. "That became a poster in every college kid's dorm room and became a famous T-shirt.
"If there is a mug shot of Donald Trump or a perp walk shot of Donald Trump that will become his campaign poster, and that will be on T-shirts, thousands and thousands of T-shirts, around America."
As the defendant, Trump will receive the mug shot and can do with it what he pleases, but it might not be immediately available to the public.
"New York state law was amended several years ago to restrict the routine release of a person's booking information, including what's known as the mug shot," Michael McAuliffe, a former Florida state attorney and federal prosecutor, told Newsweek in a story published Monday. "The New York law contains an exception allowing release for a specific law enforcement purpose. However, the statute doesn't define a specific law enforcement purpose. As a result, the standard might be whatever the relevant agency or office concludes is a specific law enforcement purpose."
McAuliffe said if the indicted person is a fugitive, the mug shot might be released to help law enforcement capture them. But in Trump's case in Manhattan, he said "the defendant's mug shot doesn't need to be released to further the case."
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