There’s a buzz of publicity as The Donald’s booking photograph makes the rounds. He named himself “The Donald” during his heyday as Page 6 (gossip) headliner in the New York Daily News. He has outdone even his record of outrage. His surrender to authorities was like a photo op. He soon raised $7 million online in sales of his tchotchkes (caps, tee shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
This filled most journalists with a frisson of fear and loathing. It should be seen as a watershed moment. Instead of calling it a mug shot, we should consider it his MiG Shot. There is good reason for this. He has done more harm to America than all the Soviet MiG combat jets designed by Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich (MiG) combined. Since he descended his Gotham golden escalator in 2015, he has brought хаос (chaos) to our politics.
He has been the Kremlin’s Man in America since 1987. He visited Moscow and Leningrad that year and came home to denounce our NATO, Japanese, and South Korean alliances. In 1990, he told Playboy he thought Gorbachev was “weak” because he failed to shoot down the Germans who streamed through the Berlin Wall. In the ‘90s, he went back to Russia banging a tin cup for Kremlin money. By 2013, he sponsored the “Miss Universe” pageant in Moscow. He is pictured under a SBERBANK logo. That’s Russia’s largest bank. It is tied to the Kremlin. His partners in that photo are Aras and Emin Agalarov. Both are oligarchs tied to Gospodin (Mr.) Putin.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2014, The Donald boasted of the “beautiful note, beautiful present” he had received from Gospodin Putin, Russia’s vozhd (boss). What did the note say? What was the gift? His payoff to Russia was instant: He praised as “brilliant” the Russian leader’s seizure of Crimea—as it was happening.
In June, 2016, his son (Donald Jr.), son-in-law (Kushner), and campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Kremlin operative Natalia Veselnitskaya in the Trump Tower. They claimed the meeting was about Russian adoptions, but they are on record fishing for campaign dirt on opponent Hillary Clinton. Steve Bannon, soon to be a major figure in the Trump constellation, described the interaction with a Kremlin figure as “treasonous” and Bannon assured twitter followers “the old man” knew all about it.
In the White House, The Donald quickly fired FBI Director James Comey, admitting to NBC News anchor Lester Holt that it was all about “the Russian thing.” Within hours of the firing—the first in history unrelated to corruption—The Donald regaled KGB-trained Russian diplomats Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak with stories of his firing Comey. The only photographers permitted access to the Oval Office were from TASS (a state-owned Russian news agency). This was the greatest coup for the KGB in one hundred years.
So, it is not out of line to identify him with his Kremlin lenders. The MiG shot is clearly an attempt by The Donald to strike a defiant pose. We’ve seen that stern and resolute face before. It is the pose struck by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in December 1941. In Ottawa, famed photographer Josef Karsh snatched away Winston’s ever-present cigar and captured his petulant response.
Will this work for The Donald? The reason the Karsh Churchill photograph “worked” is because the whole world knew that Churchill had been a war hero from his youth. He took part in the last cavalry charge of the British army (Battle of Omdurman, 1898). He had been captured by the Boers in 1900, when there was a price on his head. He jumped into the trenches with his Scottish soldiers at Ploegsteert (“Plug Street”) in Belgium. There, he led night time raids to take German prisoners to interrogate. His position was shelled by the German artillery. All of that was but prelude to Winston’s courageous “Never Surrender” stance in 1940. Then, he gained immortal glory as he faced down the onslaught of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
The world knew this. What does the world know of The Donald’s record? He bought five medical deferments from the military draft. He referred to the 1960s and his avoidance of syphilis as his “personal Vietnam.” He traveled to France and refused to go to the American cemetery there. He told aides the honored dead of World War I were “losers and suckers.” He told the world he preferred those who did not get captured—unlike John McCain and other U.S. prisoners of war. Dodging the draft was his sure way to avoid capture.
The Donald’s MiG Shot will not work. In order to be convincing in a heroic pose, you must have done something heroic. In a long life of avoiding all risk and hiding from personal danger, The Donald’s defiant stance will sell mugs perhaps, but it won’t persuade Americans he has their back—even as he turns his on them.
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