It's quite a striking image, I admit, though I've already seen it enough times. Still, I find the response to it puzzling and disturbing. Writer Philippe Lemoine posted on X that he would be "judging people based on their ability or inability to put aside their opinion about Trump and acknowledge that this picture goes extremely hard." Even people who have a sophisticated approach to interpreting images and generally a realistic view of politics—for example The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and (for heaven's sake) The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones—have been deeply moved and deeply impressed by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci's shot of a bloodied and defiant Donald Trump from below. Way too deeply moved and impressed, I'm thinking.
The political power of images is—or ought to be—proverbial. Almost all politicians attend consciously to the images that depict them and understand that they have political effects. Many still shots of Biden looking bewildered or blank have been devastating for his campaign, the effect multiplied now through endless social media posts. This sort of image interpretation, alteration, and reproduction is the basic purpose of Instagram, for example, and Vucci's photo might already be approximately the most reproduced thing in the history of the world.
