- Donald Trump might make new campaign merch soon — featuring his Georgia mugshot.
- He has previously said he wanted to make a spectacle out of his arrests.
Former President Donald Trump finally got that mugshot he's been waiting for.
This year alone, he's faced five indictments — in four cases — that charge him with a whopping 91 criminal counts.
But it was only the latest case against him — from the Fulton County DA's office, which accuses him and 18 others of creating a criminal enterprise to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results — that gave him what he dearly sought.
Before Trump was hit with his first indictment in April from the Manhattan DA's office, The New York Times reported that Trump wanted to make a spectacle out of the arrest and secretly loved the idea of being publicly perp-walked through the streets of Manhattan.
The ex-president even wondered if he should smile for his mugshot, according to the Times. And the Guardian reported Trump was hoping to be handcuffed.
Trump's advisors were gung-ho about capitalizing on the mugshot, according to Rolling Stone, and wanted him to plaster the photo onto campaign merchandise as part of a fundraising push ahead of the 2024 campaign.
But New York doesn't make mugshots public like Georgia does, so the Trump campaign had to get creative.
Immediately following that first New York indictment, the Trump campaign started advertising a new T-shirt featuring a clearly fake mugshot of the former President emblazoned with the words "NOT GUILTY."
And in the months since the indictment, his team has sent out dozens of fundraising emails making allegations of political persecution and suggesting that the Justice Department and Biden administration are out to get him to suppress his 2024 candidacy.
Now that he has the public mugshot he wanted, Trump's team might swap out the fake mugshot on his campaign merch for the real one. On Thursday, Trump rolled out a fundraising plea entirely based on the Georgia indictment and his arrest.
"Isn't it interesting that I went my entire life without ever getting arrested," the fundraiser states. "But suddenly out of nowhere, once I decided to run for president as a political outsider and fight for the forgotten citizens of our country, I get ARRESTED FOUR TIMES within the span of just 5 months?"
The former president, who made his career out of being a bombastic television figure and businessman, even timed his arrival in Georgia so that it would be captured on primetime TV.
His private jet left New Jersey at 5:25 p.m. ET and arrived in Georgia right after 7 p.m. ET. At 7:45 p.m. ET, Trump was booked at the Fulton County jail. He self-reported to be 6'3", with strawberry blonde hair, and weighing 215 pounds — 24 pounds less than White House doctors reported him to be in 2018.
An hour after his mugshot was released, Trump used it in the latest fundraising plea on his website.
Several other co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case have already surrendered to authorities, including the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and other conservative lawyers who worked on Trump's post-election efforts like John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, and Kenneth Chesebro.