Why the mugshot alone 'is justice'

27 August 2023

The criminal former president turned himself in to authorities in Georgia yesterday. He was processed in connection to an indictment brought by Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, on charges related to his alleged attempt to interfere with the Peach State’s elections two years ago.

That wasn’t the big news, though. The big news was the mugshot that came out of that processing. Donald Trump has been indicted four times now, but this was the first time his photograph was taken and released to the public. That fact is now resonating deeply, especially among pundits like Joy Reid.

The host of “The ReidOut” was on a panel of MSNBC commentators last night, watching Trump’s arraignment in Atlanta. She explained what it means to see him being treated like any American accused of crimes, after decades of watching him “persecute Black and brown people” in New York City. Given this history, she said, Trump’s mugshot alone “is justice.”

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Reid said that when she was young, Trump signified “the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me, that hated and despised my cousins, my friends, everyone we knew, that called us ‘wilding’ just because we were in the park, that said we can’t be free to walk around …

“People like Trump persecuted Black and brown people in New York,” she went on to say. “It’s what they did for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed lording over people who had nothing, who had no millionaire-dollar lawyers, who couldn’t change lawyers at the drop of a hat, who couldn’t go out and make their case on Fox … (my italics)

“This is justice,” Reid concluded. “Fani Willis is a national hero, because she’s the only one who said that wealthy, powerful and privileged men are just American citizens, and when they break the law, they will take that picture.”

That Trump’s mugshot “is justice” underscores a point I’ve been making for years – that the point of illiberal politics is sadism. When Black and brown people are treated equally, that’s not justice. That’s an injustice, a wrong that must be made right. And by making it right, there’s pleasure. To make Black and brown people suffer is to restore the natural order of things.

Cruelty, according to journalist Adam Serwer, is the point of illiberal politics. While I agree with virtually everything he has said on the subject, I’ve always chafed at the absence of one essential element of it, which is the pleasure derived from watching people on the margins of society suffer.

Cruelty can be unintentional. Sadism is never unintentional, because it’s a reaction to liberal values and democratic politics. The more Black and brown people demand their natural rights, the more white reactionaries see a perversion of “the natural order” that must be corrected at any cost.

With that correction comes the pleasure of seeing “justice” have its day.

That pleasure is the center of illiberal politics. If we don’t understand that, we don’t understand why the illiberals won’t leave Black and brown people alone. They literally can’t, because Black and brown suffering is linked to white freedom. The absence of suffering for them means the absence of “equality” for us. Freedom for Black and brown people equals white slavery.

Reid said people like Trump “persecuted Black and brown people … for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it.” But she’s talking about more than bullies punching down on the weak. She’s talking about a political order in which the desire for suffering is key to its continuation. Cruelty isn’t the point. It’s a byproduct. Sadism is the point. It always has been.

You could say that a mugshot is not anyone’s idea of justice, and there’s a lot to be said about that. But when you consider what a mugshot means, not only to pundits like Joy Reid, but to the illiberals who are outraged that Trump is being treated just like anyone else, you can see that it is justice.

It’s a righting of what’s wrong.

Whether that leads to actual criminal accountability is another question.

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