The Image Is the Man

NO COMPARISON IN context or character, but some photographs personalise history with such eloquence. In the one from 1960, taken by Alberto Korda, Che Guevara, his flowing hair defying the beret, looks towards infinity with poetic ambiguity. It is perhaps the most popular portrait. And in the one taken by AP’s Evan Vucci in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump, blood trickling down his face, pumps his fist at the heavens. The assassin’s bullet narrowly missed him, but that image of defiance, in the lore of the faithful, has already assumed the iconography of instant resurrection.

The original revolutionary was photographed from a crowd, as he was listening to Castro’s speech in Havana, and the photograph was not an instant hit. The photographs of his corpse, put on display after he was killed by a Bolivian soldier seven years later, were not as resonant as his reported last words, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man.” The man who defied death in Pennsylvania was the closest to a revolutionary America, where the present in politics and pop culture is mythologised by the power of images, could afford now. An insurgent who shattered the establishment is he certainly. His first words on rising from non-death were made for the soundbite age: Fight… Fight…

In the iconography of politics, the image of Trump Rising needs to be juxtaposed with the image of Biden Frozen. The latter exudes the staleness of redundant power; it is the tragic stillness of senescence, the feeblest challenge to gravity. Trump’s “fight… fight” is being read by the multiplying legion of believers, who had already seen the hand of God coming between the assassin’s bullet and the saviour’s brain, as a war cry and a rejoinder. A war cry prompted by the liberal rage against the “lying”, “pornographic” “felon” who wants to soil democracy. A rejoinder to the same accusers who have condemned him to the firing squad of the commentariat.

The picture would acquire an appendage. When the death defier appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he would be anointed as the Next President, what tempted the cameras was that gleaming white band-aid over his right ear. It was a reminder of the Day Before, and, in the visual evolution of the Trump candidacy, a talismanic message to the believers: I’ll come back in millions. To stretch the religious analogy, that is what is being increasingly applied to updated Trumpism: The son of God had his cross; God’s candidate has his band-aid.

To the invocation of USA, the saviour-in-chief stood there, flanked by JD Vance and Tucker Carlson, surveying the sea of red, waving and saluting punctuated by solemn thank-yous. One his prospective vice president, the other gung-ho conservatism’s fire-breathing evangelist, now migrated from mainstream to social media. Fresh from non-death, Trump was benign, as if all the belligerences went with the bullet. Donald the Beatific, accessorised by a bandage, was an image that killed the caricature. The looming figure of forgiveness was an unthinkable image before he rose from behind the lectern at Butler. Its power clarifies itself when it is pitted against the image of a president frozen in forgetfulness.

The presence of Vance takes the image to the future. Vance, the millennial protégée to the MAGA messiah, is in many ways different from Trump, the mission apart. The 39-year-old Senator from Ohio is an intellectual and author whose memoir topped the NYT bestseller list for weeks. He began as a Trump-basher and ended up as his cheerleader. His appeal crosses class barriers. He is a Catholic. And he sports a beard. He makes the question of whether there would be Trumpism after Trump irrelevant. He ensures that MAGA will be American conservatism’s future credo. As Trumpism’s heir apparent who is not as divisive and aggrieved as his most likely boss in November, Vance presented himself as a formidable Republican candidate for 2028.

Trump was telling a story he knew would scare his liberal tormentors further: You misread me folks, you saw me as a passing piece of political vulgarity, not as a force that could shift history, but I’m here, outliving bullets and bile, as the founding father of a movement of which this young man will be a worthy torch bearer. What lies between those two images, the death-defier pumping his fist and the benign one with a band-aid, is the beginning of a bigger American story. Bigger than Trump.

Assassination attemptButler PennsylvaniademocracyDonald TrumpMAGARNCVance