How Trump Has Turned Vulnerability Into Power — One Image at a Time

Donald Trump was bloodied by a bullet from his would-be assassin. He still knew the location of the group of photographers wedged between the front of the stage and the rest of the crowd.

The former and maybe future president understands like few others the singular power of pictures — how to see them, stage them, make them — and he’s always been able to transform moments of utter vulnerability into total shows of strength. He turned his bout with Covid into an image of defiance. He turned wide-ranging alleged criminality — he turned his own mug shot — into a means of political reanimation. And somehow, on Saturday at his rally in western Pennsylvania, in the chaotic wake of his brush with death, he stood up and pumped his fist and in essence told a swarm of agents from the Secret Service to stop doing their job so he could do his — and produced an image for the ages. If a certain relentlessness is one of his defining traits — his critics would say it’s shamelessness — this perhaps is his most defining skill.

“Trump instinctively understands the significance of the visual image,” Roger Stone told me in a Sunday morning text message. “His insistence on demonstrating to the crowd yesterday that he was unbroken and unhurt, and that his fight for America will continue,” said Stone, the controversial political operative who’s been an off-and-on Trump adviser for more than 40 years, “was both instinctive and brilliant.”

“It’s like visual spin, and he is a master of it,” former Trump Organization vice president Barbara Res told me.

“Always has been,” added Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist and consultant.

Gwenda Blair likened him to “a silverback gorilla” that needs “to project dominance no matter what” — the Trump biographer nodding to his privileged upbringing in the Queens, New York, neighborhood of Jamaica Estates and “the first color TV on the block that tutored him in the primacy and power of the image over all else.”

“He is a visual guy, and his main personal visual language is projecting strength,” Jennifer Mercieca, an expert on American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University, told me. “Authoritarian P.T. Barnum” — Trump in the estimation of Mercieca — “knows the importance of visual propaganda. Showing strength with visual images was how Mussolini gained and retained power. Hitler was obsessed with looking strong, even though he was small and weak,” added Mercieca, the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump , referring to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. “The visual display of strength is everything for a ‘strong man,’ and Trump’s whole campaign is built around it.”

Trump was very much already this way pre-politics. Instructed first by his father and then by Roy Cohn, he learned in his most formative stages to never admit defeat and to never evince weakness, not even in the face of the most obvious failures. Losses were actually wins . Setbacks were just the starts of comebacks . Early on he considered going to the University of Southern California film school, and did not, of course, but in effect he’s engaged in a lifelong project to create and convey a character that’s the hero at the center of his own self-styled story. “I am the creator,” as he once put it , “of my own comic book.”

These elemental Trump tenets went into hyperdrive once he announced his presidential run nine summers back, and they ramped up even more in his reality-refuting campaign since his loss in 2020, and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2001, and the onset of his legal peril ever since. “Visuals matter more than words,” former House speaker and Trump ally Newt Gingrich wrote in his book called Understanding Trump in 2017. “How you look is more important than how you sound,” Stone told me in 2018 . “He has,” Republican strategist Liam Donovan said to me on Sunday, “a handful of instincts and impulses that have served him well, but the primacy of aesthetics and image-making really is the core.”

“He’s an entertainer,” Rick Wilson, the longtime political strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told me.

“He always knows,” he said, “where the camera is looking.”

In October of 2020, barely emerging from a sapping strain of Covid and smack in the thick of a reelection bid he would lose, Trump walked out of Walter Reed hospital, helicoptered back to the White House and scaled some stairs to the porch of the South Portico — where, laboring for breath, he peeled off his mask, a scene set to the soundtrack of the whir of the rotors of Marine One and all of the clicks of the cameras positioned below. “A theatrical gesture,” a writer from The New Yorker called it . “Bizarre and propagandistic,” said an analyst from CNN . “It was really a dramatic made-for-TV moment,” as the White House correspondent from NPR described — made not by accident, it almost went without saying, but in the mind’s eye of Trump. “It was like he knew,” the reporter said on the radio, “this was going to be something that was captured by cameras, could be part of history.”

Late last August, forced to turn himself in as part of the Fulton County election interference case against him, the former president traveled to Atlanta and sat for a mug shot. “Not a comfortable feeling,” he would say later , “especially when you’ve done nothing wrong.” He couldn’t prevent it. But he knew how he wanted and needed it to look. And he knew how to use it. Glowering and pugnacious, no fake smile or blank stare, Trump took a kind of picture usually associated with ignominy or at least a sort of chagrin and mined the unlikely ore of pure political fuel . His fundraising went up . His polling went up . “A mug shot is a genre,” USC professor Marty Kaplan told the Associated Press at the time . “It’s the walk of shame moment.” Trump and his team made sure it was not. “This mugshot,” read many a Trump money-asking pitch, “will forever go down in history as a symbol of America’s defiance of tyranny.” Trump turned his mug shot into a tag line — “NEVER SURRENDER!” — a tag line plastered on hats and shirts and all other manners of merch, merch with the one indelible photo that stoked his comeback and powered this campaign.

Until Saturday.

“Take a look at that chart,” Trump was saying on the stage in Butler, pointing to his right, at a screen with a graph about illegal immigration, and unwittingly, too, in the general direction of the young man on a roof with a rifle who was about to try to kill him. “And then the worst president in the history of our country took over and look what happened to our country,” Trump said. “And if you want to see something really sad …” And then came the first sounds of shots, and then he reached for his ear, and then people were screaming, and then the cameras tracked the urgency of the agents from the Secret Service …

“Get down, get down, get down.”

“What’re we doing, what’re we doing?”

“Shooter’s down, shooter’s down …”

“Let’s move, let’s move … sir, we’ve got to move …”

“ Wait, wait, wait ,” Trump said.

And he showed in their clutch his face and the top of his right ear, streaked and splotched with his blood, so shockingly close to such certain death. And just before he appeared to be more limp and stricken and overcome, he summoned the posture that will be much more abiding, pumping his fist, clenching his face, imploring his followers to fight .

“Leveraging any situation to his sole advantage is his defining skill,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me Sunday. “Conviction for sexual assault, bankruptcy, felony conviction, and now …”

“He was shot yet had the presence of mind to quickly gather himself enough to know to tell his supporters he was OK and … show defiance in the face of danger,” top Chris Christie adviser Mike DuHaime told me. “That’s instinct. His harshest critics are often blind to his undeniable political skill. He figured out the moment before anyone else could.”

“Trump’s instincts,” said Marcus, his former consultant and publicist, “took over.”

“He knows preternaturally what the New York Post wood will be,” said Tim Miller , the former Jeb Bush aide who’s now a leading anti-Trump voice, using the industry lingo for the punchy combo of images and words on the front of the tabloid so linked with Trump’s life and rise.

“Meisterstück der politischen Kommunikation,” the German publication Der Spiegel called it in the aftermath of the assassination attempt. A masterpiece of political communication .

Doug Mills from The New York Times and Jabin Botsford from The Washington Post , Getty’s Anna Moneymaker and the AP’s Evan Vucci — a collection of some of the nation’s finest photographers were where they were, click, click, click . And Trump was hustled off the stage, and into his waiting SUV and to a local hospital and eventually back home, and by Sunday afternoon, in a fundraising email, the mug shot from Atlanta had been replaced by the newly iconic image from Pennsylvania. “I am Donald J. Trump,” it said, “and I will NEVER SURRENDER!”