The Defiant Trump Image That Made Critics Join the Cult

How a single photograph transformed Trump into a mythical leader for some critics and supporters alike.

It's quite a striking image, I admit, though I've already seen it enough times. Still, I find the response to it puzzling and disturbing. Writer Philippe Lemoine posted on X that he would be "judging people based on their ability or inability to put aside their opinion about Trump and acknowledge that this picture goes extremely hard." Even people who have a sophisticated approach to interpreting images and generally a realistic view of politics—for example The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and (for heaven's sake) The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones—have been deeply moved and deeply impressed by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci's shot of a bloodied and defiant Donald Trump from below. Way too deeply moved and impressed, I'm thinking.

The political power of images is—or ought to be—proverbial. Almost all politicians attend consciously to the images that depict them and understand that they have political effects. Many still shots of Biden looking bewildered or blank have been devastating for his campaign, the effect multiplied now through endless social media posts. This sort of image interpretation, alteration, and reproduction is the basic purpose of Instagram, for example, and Vucci's photo might already be approximately the most reproduced thing in the history of the world.

The power of images can be used to inspire and uplift, or to obscure the truth and encourage people to oppress themselves. Often, the goal is both of these at once. If that photo sends you into a mystical ecstasy, if it seduces you toward some kind of worship of Donald Trump, it is having bad effects. Were we searching for a word, we might just call this approach to images "idolatry." 

Political idolatry is a problem. On the other hand, I wouldn't blame the worshiped image, which just sits there, really. I wouldn't blame the photographer either, who did his job, showing what happened from the angle he had. It's the worshiper who's responsible. 

Admittedly, the line between religion and politics has worn thin. But when people are literally worshiping images of a leader, or are engaged in political idolatry, oppression and war are predictable corollaries.

"People like to think they are rational and in control," says Steven Hassan, renowned cult expert and the author of The Cult of Trump, "but the lessons of history and social psychology demonstrate, time and again, that simply isn't so. We go about our days, and our lives, using unconscious mental models. When cult leaders manipulate those models, in subtle and overt ways, we can be persuaded to believe and do things we might never have considered without such systematic psychological influence."

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't read it, but Jones' July 15 article about the image starts by making clear that Jones (still?) disagrees with Trump's positions and doesn't want the man to be president. But he can no longer resist the cult, it appears. "[Trump] uses the rhetoric of struggle and division he always has," writes Jones, "but with a new urgency as he calls on America to fight in his name, over his body. And he has instantly thought out how to communicate this visually." He's attributing a sort of intuitive image-making genius here, and we can begin to feel Jones' own visual seduction in process.

The heart of this picture's meaning can be summed up in one word: blood. And the connotations of that go deeper than politics or patriotism. Christian supporters of Trump won't be slow to see his survival as mystical. And they will be right, at least from the perspective of art history. Whatever else this scene may be, it is, at the iconographic level, religious. It is almost literally a resurrection. Trump has risen up from below the podium where he'd hidden, as if he were Christ rising from the tomb. In great paintings of that central Christian moment, such as Matthias Grünewald's spooky, perturbing vision of a triumphant Jesus in the Isenheim altarpiece, there is blood. Grünewald's risen Christ shows the bloody spear wound in his side, the bloody nail holes in his hands, just as in this picture we can see Trump's gory ear and the crimson blood on his cheek.

Trump truly appears to be giving his blood here, a sacrifice for America. Like Jesus, he survives the sacrifice and rises again.

This strikes me as astonishing, as directly expressing the beginnings of a cult to which Jones enthusiastically, or perhaps involuntarily, submits himself. "Yet it actually happened. It is happening." "Look at the blood," demands Jones. "It's real blood caused by a real bullet that shaved a real man's ear. That man really raises his fist in defiance in a mystically patriotic instant myth of resurrection." He finishes by predicting that Trump will win the 2024 election—he should have finished by claiming that the religion of Trump will persist for millennia. "Yet it actually happened!"

The cult is apparently making inroads even at the opinion section of The New York Times, where Ross Douthat gives us these remarkable sentences. 

I feel comfortable making one sweeping statement about the moments when Trump shifted his head fractionally and literally dodged a bullet, fell bleeding and then rose with his fist raised in an iconic image of defiance. The scene on Saturday night in Pennsylvania was the ultimate confirmation of his status as a man of destiny, a character out of Hegel or Thomas Carlyle or some other verbose 19th-century philosopher of history, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.

In Hegel's work, the great man of history is understood as a figure "whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit." Hegel's paradigm was Napoleon, the Corsican adventurer whose quest for personal power and military glory spread the ideas of the French Revolution, shattered the old regimes of Europe and ushered in the modern age.

For people who oppose Trump to be saying things like this is quite striking. One thing the Times and The Guardian are comfortable saying, evidently, is that Donald Trump is a man of destiny, a great man, "mystical," a figure touched by the gods. 

Perhaps the Times and The Guardian (and CNN and many others) shouldn't have tried to inflate Trump into an Adolf Hitler and a Satan all these years. They were making ready the abyssal cult into which they've now tumbled. What I want to say is that really (really) that thing is just a picture. Trump conducted himself courageously, and Vucci got the angle. Admirable, but it has no tendency to show that Trump is divine, the Chosen One, or whatever Jonathan Jones and Ross Douthat now take him to be. 

Authoritarian leaders use images to try to produce a cult of themselves, as Saddam Hussein loomed over Baghdad or Ferdinand Marcos over Manila or Mao Zedong over Beijing. But they usually have to force the critics and polemicists to buy in by threatening their families or something else dear to them. Here, the idolaters are volunteers.