He looked old.
That's the first thing I noticed about the first photographs of Donald Trump released Tuesday from a New York courtroom. Trump works so hard to manage his image -- indeed, the idea of Trump matters more than the real man it often seems -- and here he was, for once in a setting not of his own choosing. No Air Force One. No TRUMP-branded plane. No skyscraper. Just a man sitting among his attorneys, his hair looking a bit mussed.
He looked small.
He looked ordinary.
He definitely did not look fierce, even if that's the message Trump and his team wanted to convey. At the same time he was being arraigned, his presidential campaign sent out a fundraising email offering donors a "free" T-shirt with a "mugshot" of Trump emblazoned across the chest. But it wasn't a mugshot: It was his old, glaring official photo, Photoshopped onto a jail setting. He's a bad boy and you know you love him, was the barely subtextual message.
That won't be the image people remember, though.
What they'll remember is the former most powerful man in the world sitting in a courtroom, looking diminished.
I have been uncomfortable with the New York prosecution from the start, for reasons that don't much matter here. But I wonder if the prosecution might be quietly effective in a way I didn't quite expect, robbing Trump of the aura he's used to crowd out possible rivals to his leadership of the Republican Party.
The GOP -- as I've written before -- seems to especially prize a picture of virility in it's most-beloved leaders. It can get ridiculous at times. Trump, as he does with everything, has weaponized that tendency, has worked assiduously to be the alpha in a roomful of betas, and has maintained that status even through losing the popular vote twice, and being impeached twice. To a great degree, and through no small amount of John Barron-style trickery, the former president has managed to rarely be seen in formats that he didn't dominate.
For once, he was seen submitting. To the authority of the state, yes, but still.
This both thrills me -- yes, I'm feeling the schadenfreude -- and maybe alarms me a little bit. Because it's an indicator of how much power the justice system has: All it takes is an accusation to denude somebody, to some extent. There will be due process, and there's a good chance he'll get off with little or no penalty -- this is Trump, after all -- but that image might be the thing that undoes him.
If so, good. But also: Ugh. It's easy and even correct to mock the right's "if they can do it to him, they can do it to you" warnings regarding Trump, but also: It's kind of true. How much would a prosecution, even if it ended up failing, upend our lives and livelihoods?
I'm not worried about Trump. I am glad to see him diminished. It’s necessary. But it's never that simple where he's concerned. It never is.
My worry is that a martyr is a more powerful symbol than a has-been.