The art of the image: Trump as his own executive producer

The once and soon-to-be president takes advantage of the blurry lines between appearance and perception, between reputation.

Not long after Donald Trump surrendered himself for booking at an Atlanta jail in 2023, he told a clutch of allies and advisers about his experience posing for America’s first presidential mugshot. Other defendants charged in the case had seen a series of unflattering booking photos released that looked washed-out, awkward and uncomfortable.

But Trump said he
had quickly noted where the light was coming from in the room and knew how to best position his face, according to two people who recalled his remarks. He had shown potential facial expressions to aides in advance, one person recalled, and settled on a scowl. When the time came, he glowered and leaned forward. The camera caught a deep and defiant stare, his face half in shadow and half in light.

Imagery – and Trump’s mastery of it – played a vital role in powering his return to the White House. In many ways, Trump was not just a candidate navigating the 2024 race but the executive producer of his own political comeback.

“If you had to boil down his job description throughout his career, it’s basically that,” said David Kochel, a longtime Republican strategist. “He’s been doing it for 40 years – in politics, in business, in media. He’s one of the best we’ve ever seen.”

Other modern presidents have grasped how to create evocative images that tell stories. Ronald Reagan had his horses and cowboy hat. George W. Bush cleared brush. Bill Clinton pulled out his saxophone on a late-night show. But Democrats and Republicans alike marvel at the savvy of Trump’s political stagecraft, crediting his years rising through the cutthroat tabloid culture of New York and as a television star on The Apprentice.

“He’s uniquely suited to this,” said Anna Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, who said focus group participants still invoke Trump’s portrayal on The Apprentice when discussing his business acumen. “His whole professional life has been about brand and image.”

In the 2024 race, Trump repeatedly used visuals to reframe political vulnerabilities – indictments, a trial, a conviction – as visceral symbols of strength and resilience. He showed remarkable instincts as he rose from being shot by a would-be assassin to pumping his fist in the air, the campaign’s most indelible image. And he manufactured a series of memorable moments that broke through the clutter of the campaign, perhaps none more so than handing out french fries from a McDonald’s drive-thru window.

“He understands the visual image that’s presented is what people remember,” said Michael Glassner, a veteran Republican operative who was one of Trump’s earliest hires in 2015 and has been involved in staging his events ever since. For nearly a decade now, he said, the colour, lighting and acoustics of Trump rallies have been set to Trump’s specifications.

“The Trump rally as a TV show – he was the director and producer,” Glassner said. “We were there to carry out his wishes.”

Almost no detail is too small to catch Trump’s eye. At one early event, Glassner recalled, Trump pulled him aside and informed him that the signs were the wrong shade of red. “He was right,” Glassner said. “It wasn’t the standardised red.”

Now, as Trump prepares for the pageantry of an inauguration, the ways he found advantage in the grey areas between appearance and perception, between reputation and reality, are instructive – not just for how he won back the White House but for how he can be expected to tell the story of his second term.

Role-playing after a disaster

One of Trump’s earliest significant outings in the 2024 campaign saw him play the role of a President visiting disaster-struck Middle America.

This was in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, days after a train derailment had spilled hazardous chemicals. President Joe Biden had yet to appear on the scene. And the images of Trump that were carried on television – arriving by plane, travelling by motorcade, touring the site, distributing (Trump-branded) water – all served to cast him as the rightful President of flyover country.

“You are not forgotten,” he said.

Democrats watched with concern.

“I remember at the time thinking: If they do more of this, we’re in trouble,” said Doug Landry, who produced campaign stops for both Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Top Trump aides say the trip was a turning point that helped the former President regain his political footing.

Rewriting the story of January 6

The next month, Trump held his first official rally of the 2024 campaign as he awaited indictment in New York. The location – Waco, Texas – was freighted with symbolism: It was the scene, 30 years earlier, of a deadly standoff between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians, a religious cult, that far-right lore now casts as an example of governmental overreach.

Trump stood onstage with his right hand on his heart, his left holding a red MAGA hat. The sound system played a recording of the national anthem, sung by people imprisoned for the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, interspersed with Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance. Giant TV screens showed scenes from that day.

“It’s a provocative image,” Glassner said, “and done purposefully”.

Trump may have been impeached and under investigation for his role in inspiring the January 6 mob, but he had no intention of ceding the symbols of patriotism.

The message: Trump’s supporters were being wrongfully prosecuted, just as he was.

Arraignment as cause for celebration

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Trump was indicted for the second time, in Florida in June 2023, on federal charges related to mishandling classified documents. After his arraignment in Miami, he went straight to Versailles, a Cuban restaurant that is a fixture of the city’s Little Havana neighbourhood, where he was mobbed by supporters seeking selfies as cable channels carried the scene live.

Before long, Jake Tapper of CNN urged his control room to cut away. “I don’t need to see any more of that,” he said on the air. “He’s trying to turn it into a spectacle, into a campaign ad. That’s enough of that.”

But it was too late. Trump had provided the B-roll of his own arraignment: visual displays of support that would be shown again and again as panels of experts discussed the legal case.

Whatever viewers might hear, Trump had seized control of what they saw.

Trump and his team took particular pleasure in Tapper’s exasperation.

Mileage from a mug shot

One group of Republicans with whom Trump avoided being photographed in 2023 consisted of his rivals for the party’s presidential nomination. He never shared a stage with them, and he skipped all the primary debates, refusing to let his challengers share airtime with him or even occupy space on the same visual plane.

In fact, he had his mugshot taken a day after his rivals’ first debate – eclipsing and denying them the kind of media attention and political momentum they might have hoped for.

Trump also used the occasion to post on Twitter for the first time in more than two years. “Never surrender,” he wrote as a caption to the booking photo, which instantly flashed across the online world.

The post was viewed more than 333 million times, according to the platform. The mugshot spurred what was then his strongest fundraising day, and turbocharged sales of campaign merchandise.

Trump had other ways to show himself on the right side of the law: He routinely greeted law enforcement officers in tarmac photo ops.

A trial as an asset

Trump’s trial in New York last year began after he had captured the Republican nomination, and a who’s who of party leaders came to the courthouse to show their support. The resulting images were vivid.

Most mornings, Trump addressed the cameras with the most powerful politicians in the party standing directly behind him, unavoidably included in the shot: the House Speaker, his 2024 primary rivals, and the contenders to be his running mate, including Senator JD Vance, whom he eventually chose.

The pictures told a story far clearer and more accessible than what was happening in the camera-free courtroom: win or lose, this was Trump’s party.

Two days after Trump’s conviction, he staged a dramatic public reappearance on live television, walking through a tunnel and emerging into a Newark, New Jersey, arena packed for an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight, shaking hands, pumping his fist and basking in a roaring ovation.

The message there was even simpler: even as a convicted criminal, Trump remained a champion.

Will Ritter, CEO of a Republican advertising agency who served as the director of advance for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said Trump had mastered how to provide “positive information flow”.

Visually, Ritter said, “He doesn’t lose. There is no contrition. There is never even a retreat”.

“Fight, fight, fight!”

Easily the most memorable image of the campaign was Trump’s instinctive response to the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

He rose to his feet seconds after a bullet bloodied his ear, pumped his fist towards the cameras and the crowd, and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight!” – a scene as vivid as any Hollywood creation.

“That is going to be an iconic moment that goes down in American political history,” said Mark Longabaugh, a veteran Democratic strategist and former top adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. “He’s just such an instinctual politician.”

Two days later, Trump again had himself filmed entering an arena through a tunnel – this time arriving in the Republican convention hall in Milwaukee for his first public appearance after the assassination attempt, now with a large square bandage on his right ear.

He took in the convention from a VIP seating area reminiscent of the British royals at Wimbledon or the Roman emperors in the Colosseum, conveying his dominance in every cutaway shot.

Soon, convention attendees wore bandages over their ears in solidarity.

Trump made a triumphant return to Butler as well, for a rally in October that sent yet another defiant message.

Campaign aides saw to it that the American flag that flew above and behind him that day was even bigger than the one seen in some photos of the assassination attempt.

Slinging fries and sending a message

Trailing behind Trump in his convention entrance was Justin Caporale, who oversaw nearly all of Trump’s major appearances.

Caporale, who has since been named “executive producer for major events” for Trump’s political operation outside the White House, also conceived of and choreographed Trump’s apron-wearing October stop at a suburban Pennsylvania McDonald’s that was shut down for the occasion.

Trump slung french fries for a few minutes, and then handed out orders through a drive-thru window, all for the cameras.

“We think of it as a circus,” said Greg Hale, who served as director of presidential production for Biden and has helped stage Democratic events for 20 years. “But people go to the circus and are entertained.”

In one of Trump’s final acts as a candidate, he rode around an airport tarmac in a garbage truck wearing a neon safety vest, trying to reframe a comedian’s racist remark at a Trump rally as an attack on Biden and Harris.

But it was the McDonald’s stop that strategists in both parties said had reinforced the greatest combination of Trump’s campaign themes: high food prices, his focus on the working class and his questioning of Harris’ biography – she had said she once worked at a McDonald’s – as well as his genuine affection for fast food.

“This whole distinction between authentic and inauthentic, real and unreal, has been erased,” said Marty Kaplan, who studies the social and political impact of entertainment as director of the Norman Lear Centre at the University of Southern California.

“Calling it political imagery understates what it is, because politics has become a branch of entertainment,” he added. “And if anyone was born to straddle those worlds, it’s Trump.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Shane Goldmacher

Photographs by: Doug Mills, Maddie McGarvey, Christopher Lee and Emily Elconin

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