The Media, the Prosecutor, and Ex-President All Want the Same Thing From His Booking — And Deep Down, So Do You

The Fulton County communications department sent a media advisory out Wednesday morning, detailing the specific booking process for all 19 defendants named in the recently announced indictment by District Attorney Fani Willis.

Former President Donald Trump and 18 others who were indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in the elections probe have until noon on Friday, August 25, to surrender.

It’s a pretty standard approach by any municipality expecting a raft of press coverage to have a robust process for dealing with the oncoming swarm, which is to be expected given the historic and unprecedented processing of a former president, complete with a mug shot and possible handcuffs.

The advisory opened with specifics on how criminal cases are typically booked before noting that they expect all “19 defendants named in the indictment will be booked at the Rice Street Jail.” It proceeds to advise press outlets on areas to set up for live coverage.

District Attorney Willis has received over-the-top praise from left-of-center opinionators and harsh criticism from the right for what is seen — perhaps reasonably — as a self-promoting partisan play. It’s the world in which we currently live — nothing is done in the public sphere without it being seen as confirmation of a pre-existing political narrative.

The imminent booking of Trump will be a media spectacle that will rival and likely surpass his previous arraignments, mainly because this specific jurisdiction appears to be willing to process the former president in a manner distinct and different than Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg or Special Counsel Jack Smith.

While previous prosecutors erred on the side of professional courtesies extended to the former president, Fulton County administrators are eager to treat Trump no differently than any common criminal they typically process, complete with promises to shoot mug shots, despite this particular subjecting having one of the most recognizable “mugs” in the world.

Cable news will not just have the OJ-style motorcade to follow overhead with helicopters; they will also have cameras in the courtroom, a mugshot, the whole shebang. And because this is a state-level arraignment, Trump cannot pardon himself if elected for a second term. It’s reality TV at its most dramatic and consequential. DA Willis has revealed through her partisan communications that she has no compunction with the drama — in fact; she embraces it.

Trump lives for this shit, Cable News covers it wall to wall, and we gobble it up.

They won’t come out and say it, but there is also a clear sense of schadenfreude at play here that some commentators have noticed in a racialized hue in the context of the victims of Trump’s disinformation campaign in Fulton County.

But the spectacular nature of Trump reporting to Rice Street Jail for arraignment and mugshot is not solely the work of Fani Willis. The former president himself certainly wants to make this as big a spectacle as humanly possible.

It’s not only what the former competitive reality show host does at a world-class level, but it’s entirely consistent with the woe-is-me victimhood narrative. Trump is so clearly making this entire ordeal his “cross to bear” that he may actually show up to Rice Street Jail with a massive wooden cross like college campus religious extremists of yesteryear.

But the looming media spectacle isn’t just the result of what DA Willis and former President Trump desire. If you’re being honest with yourself, a part of you — deep down — wants to see it. I do too!

Yeah, it’s maybe a crass thing to admit, and perhaps we all like to admit that we are better than stooping to this sort of rubbernecking style of viewing. But everyone driving past a traffic accident slows down to see what’s happening. And that’s precisely what will happen here.

It’s very easy to blame the media for its political coverage, and much of the criticism is well deserved. But I’ve long felt that when we criticize the media, we often talk about what we don’t like about our collective selves. The media is nothing but a mirror that reflects our current social mores for better and (mostly) worse.

Criticizing the media is also a convenient way to blame something other than the actual thing at hand. The looming spectacle to come from Trump’s booking is not the fault of the predictable breathless media coverage. No, the entire blame should be focused on the alleged criminal conspiracy outlined in the indictment.

The spectacle is but merely a symptom of a deeper malady at hand, something we would all do well to remind ourselves regularly.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.