Bloodied face, fist raised in defiance: how this image may win Trump the US presidency (2024)

The Stars and Stripes flutters in the background as a bloody-faced Donald Trump raises a fist in defiance and calls on his supporters to fight on.

The image of Trump seconds after surviving an assassination attempt is one of those photographs of obvious and immediate power.

He could not have looked more like an American hero if he tried. If he wins the election in November, it will likely be considered one of a handful of photographs that altered the course of the country’s history.

It is a product of world-class photojournalism – and also, perhaps, of Trump’s innate political instincts.

About a minute after Trump took cover from a gunman’s bullets, the Secret Service agents shielding his body decided to move him to safety. “We’re clear, let’s move,” they were heard saying before raising the former president to his feet.

But Trump told them to “wait”. Before being ushered away, he turned to the crowd, raised his fist and mouthed what looked, to lip readers, like the word “fight”.

Trump, of course, is a showman. Those who know him describe how he is constantly thinking about how he will appear at a given moment. Whether he was acting on pure instinct, or he had time in those 60 seconds on the ground to actually think through a photo opportunity, it paid off.

The Telegraph ran with a shot by the AP’s Evan Vucci, standing below Trump. But there are no shortage of variations on the theme. Anna Money of Getty and Brendan McDermid of Reuters captured the moment from other angles.

The New York Times’ Doug Mills even captured what appears to be the bullet in flight after it clipped Trump’s right ear.

By Sunday afternoon, Chinese entrepreneurs had already started selling souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with the photograph

“We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US,” Li Jinwei, one of the online sellers to start selling such T-shirts on the Taobao e-commerce platform, told the South China Morning Post.

Mr Vucci, an AP veteran who memorably photographed a protester throwing a shoe at George W Bush in Iraq, described how experience as a war photographer helped him in capturing the historic moment on Saturday.

“Over my left shoulder, I heard pops, and I knew immediately what it was, and I just kind of went into work mode,” he told Kasie Hunt on CNN This Morning.

“That experience does help, trying to stay calm and understand you have a job to do.”

“As a still photographer, I don’t get a second chance,” he said.

It is too early to tell how their images will change the campaign. But they will certainly be compared to a handful of other iconic American photographs.

The obvious historic parallel should be the blurry image of Jackie Kennedy clambering out of the back of the presidential limousine after her husband, John F Kennedy, had been shot dead next to her in November 1963. Or the gaggle of suited secret servicemen leaping on John Hinckley after he shot Ronald Reagan in 1981.

But it is another image that instantly springs to mind.

The Secret Service agents, braced against Trump as they try to usher him away while shielding him, bear an unmistakable resemblance in posture, movement, and unity of purpose as the six US Marines who raised the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima in 1945.

Joe Rosenthal’s famous picture is, like Mr Vucci’s from Saturday, an action shot capturing both a split second of frantic activity and a major moment in history. And of course there is the flag itself, fluttering in proud defiance of an attack on American democracy.

It is quite literally the broad stripes and bright stars still gallantly streaming. There could not be anything more American.

The outcome of the Second World War was not in doubt when Iwo Jima fell. But other photographs have been credited with changing the course of events.

Perhaps the most famous came in June 1972, when the New York Times published on its front page a black and white photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing an air strike that mistakenly hit civilians.

Nick Ut’s photograph of nine-year old Phan Thị Kim Phúc was such an indictment of the use of napalm that President Richard Nixon even mused privately whether it had been staged to turn opinion against the war. It had not.

It is unclear whether that picture did help end the war, which ran on for another three years. The American public had already largely turned against the conflict by the time it appeared. But it is considered one of the most politically consequential photographs to date.

Because America is so young, much of its history has been caught on camera: Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon in 1969; Muhammad Ali standing over a defeated Sonny Liston; Tommie Smithand John Carlos making the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics.

The Twin Towers billowing smoke on September 11, the plethora of images from the rubble after they fell, and three firefighters raising the flag at ground zero afterwards, a hooded prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison, Barack Obama watching the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The image of Trump is so perfectly formed that some, like president Nixon or conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landings were faked, might be tempted to wonder if it is genuine.

But that would be to misunderstand the nature of photojournalism in moments of chaos and danger.

As Rosenthal, who nearly missed the moment on Iwo Jima, and had to press the shutter without time to look through the viewfinder, put it: “When you take a picture like that, you don’t come away saying you got a great shot. You don’t know.”

Bloodied face, fist raised in defiance: how this image may win Trump the US presidency (2024)

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