Donald Trump campaign using fake mugshot to fundraise off indictment

Former President Donald Trump is using a photoshopped mugshot to raise money for his presidential campaign and a related fund that has paid for a slew of expenses including lawyers.

A fundraising email sent before his arraignment began shows a black-and-white picture of Trump looking directly into the camera photoshopped in front of a height chart – with a fake nameplate in front of him referencing him as the 45th and 47th president.

The height chart indicates Trump's height is 6'5", taller than he is. 

Below the picture is an all-caps, “NOT GUILTY.”

Supporters can donate $47 to get their own T-shirt, the email says.

Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said before the arraignment that Trump would not take a mugshot.

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Kurt Braddock, a public communication professor at American University, said the look on Trump's face and presenting him as taller than he is "signal strength, something I'm sure he wants to project to assist in raising funds." 

"Pictures can be powerful vehicles for persuasion, so by visualizing his arrest in this way, his campaign can frame him as a victim of unfair persecution," he said. 

The email also repeats a common theme in the Trump team’s fundraising emails accusing Democratic philanthropist George Soros of hand-picking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the case before the New York grand Jury.

While Soros is a major funder of liberal causes who supports Democratic prosecutors, his spokesperson said he has never met Bragg, and campaign finance experts call the two men’s financial links overstated.

Soros, who is Jewish, is a long-running target of antisemitic tropes from the far right, framing him as a puppet master. Attacks against Soros are also common in his home country of Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has forged ties with the far right in the United States and on Monday came out in support of Trump fighting the indictment.

Lawrence Rosenthal, the director of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at UC Berkeley, said Soros has become the new target of the far right. “He’s become the go-to,” Rosenthal said. “There are billboards in Budapest with big pictures of Soros as the enemy.”

Contributing: Josh Meyer, Kevin Johnson, and Sudiksha Kochi