The pure media savvy of Trump’s fist pump photo, explained by an expert

The photo has already become inescapable. You’ve undoubtedly seen it: It is in newspapers, in memes, on T-shirts. Former President Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, face streaked with blood, raising a fist into the sky. A man defiant in the face of potential death. “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic […]

The photo has already become inescapable. You’ve undoubtedly seen it: It is in newspapers, in memes, on T-shirts. Former President Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, face streaked with blood, raising a fist into the sky. A man defiant in the face of potential death.

“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump told the New York Post, of the picture, taken immediately following an attempt on his life at a July 13 rally. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”

“Trump has an iconic image,” agrees Erik Bucy, a professor of strategic communication whose research focuses on political imagery. “One for the ages, that is instantly recognizable. These only come around once in a while.”

Bucy studies political communications to analyze the way people who aren’t highly engaged with the news make sense of things. For low-information voters, who tend to be undecided, political images are a powerful shorthand for expressing who key political figures are and what they aim to do. So I called Bucy up to ask him to talk through Trump’s iconic gunshot photo with me and try to figure out what an image this powerful might communicate to the electorate. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Let’s start off just diving right into the Trump photo itself. What do you think that it communicates when you look at it?

It communicates resiliency in the face of crisis, and a certain kind of instinctual strength, but also an instinct about performance and maximizing the moment from a media point of view.

He’s bloodied. He’s got to be in an initial phase of shock. And yet he still realizes, “Wait, there’s a media opportunity here, and that above all else has to be kind of leveraged before I even get off the stage. Who cares if there’s other shooters?” Which there might have been. 

It’s pretty remarkable from that point of view. I doubt many politicians or public figures would have had that presence of mind. Just that boldness to make the most of it visually. That shows you how he’s oriented and why he’s remained in front of our screen for the past nine years.

Do you think that for an average viewer looking at this picture, they think first about the almost animal, instinctual media savvy there? Or are they thinking about the idea of resilience in the face of violence?

No, they’re seeing that American symbolism. They’re seeing the blue sky. They’re seeing him defiant despite having just been injured, being surrounded by dedicated guards and Secret Service members. 

And I think that the fundamental takeaway is: This is a powerful person who’s got a lot of determination and — and you wouldn’t think this of Donald Trump, but — a lot of courage in the face of real threat.

And then there are other people who have looked at this image and have been like, “This seems too perfect. It must be fake.” So can you speak a little to why this seems to have been a surprisingly prevalent response from a lot of people?

This is our conspiracy-oriented, hypermediatized age, which brings into question images that we know, once they’re captured and presented and published, can be easily manipulated. Whether it’s by Photoshop or whether that’s by traditional editing techniques or AI, these days it’s very easy to manipulate an image.

And yet we have the video and we have the real-time commentary and we have all the other triangulation that happens around the event to confirm that this actually happened in real time. We have articles that explain it was a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, his name was Evan Vucci, who got underneath and risked his own life and safety to get the shot. 

There’s nothing staged or Photoshopped or faked about it, but I can understand how a narrative is going to be pieced together. Because it seems like nothing was really happening on the Trump side [as we were] watching the slow disintegration of [President] Joe Biden’s campaign and ability as a politician. And then suddenly he has this moment right before the convention. In the timing of it, and the fact he survived it, and there were bullets whizzing past and none of them got to him, I can see why people would be a little bit suspicious about that. But nobody’s going to take that risk — “Go ahead and start shooting into a live scene with snipers on the roof and what, we’ll hope we get a good campaign photo out of that?” It’s just too great a risk.

I can understand where it’s coming from. Because it is going to help Trump in the short term. There’s a rally-around-the-flag effect. He’s a former president. He’s the symbol. That’s why George W. Bush’s poll numbers went into the 90s after 9/11. It’s the same phenomenon. 

I want to take a step back now and look at this moment in the context of some of the research that you do. Can you lay out how politicians generally use imagery to communicate with the public?

Public performance is about communication of competitiveness, of strength. Particularly in relation to another competitor, which Trump is constantly evoking. It’s about social dominance: achieving it, maintaining it, and sustaining it. Trump is exceptional at achieving and maintaining this dominance relative to anyone next to him. 

Now in the case of the photo, he’s actually showing defiance. The gestures indicate a kind of determined upending or determined pushing back against a force that’s out to get you, a kind of a David and Goliath scenario, which he’s created narratively. 

He’s constantly moving his hands, pointing, gesticulating. Some of his wacky gestures make sense, some don’t. But he’s showing a couple things there. A, he’s agentic, which means he’s very active, and he’s exuding strength through movement. He’s really good at this behind a podium and on a stage and in front of an audience. The audience seems to give him strength and energy. B, by pointing and gesticulating and punching and pumping your fist, that’s overt defiance, which is one of the two big categories of gestures that we look at. 

We look at affinity, which is open-palm, waving, welcoming. You kind of relax. It can also be like, “Okay, you’ve dominated me. I give up.” And we look at defiance. Defiance is, “You can’t get me. I’m coming. Whatever you throw at me, I’m gonna stand tall.” And that’s what he’s doing here. 

So on a very fundamental level, however you’re evaluating Trump, whatever side politically you’re on, however sophisticated, you see this portrait of strength. For Democrats, it’s in the person that you don’t want to have it. For Republicans, and particularly Trump supporters, it’s in a manner that channels the very ideal that you have of this guy.

He’s lifting himself out of the meme world and out of the Photoshop world where they would portray him as Superman or they portray him as a Hulk Hogan in the ring with CNN. And now he really is a survivor. He’s defiant. He is this kind of ubermensch. He’s this guy who can just make it happen and is somehow stronger than the ordinary person. It conveys to him leadership capacities on a very fundamental, primal level, and that’s where he operates his best skills. 

It’s not speaking. It’s not putting together complex arguments or thoughts. It’s a projecting not only of defiance, but what it really signals, which is social dominance. And if he’s one of two candidates in the race, he’s got it and the other guy doesn’t. 

Do you see this performance of dominance through imagery as the main valence of American politics? I see someone like [former President Barack] Obama as being very good at portraying imagery of unity and collaboration. Is that secondary to this larger issue?

Yeah, I think it’s secondary. Communication operates on multiple levels and multiple modes. We call it multi-modalities. You’ve got verbal and written communication, and you’ve got visual and nonverbal communication. Even within that, you have facial displays and gestures with your hands, but also you have posture. You also have tone of voice and overall body orientation. So, are you slouching or you’re looking down; are you backed up against your heel? There’s any number of things you’re communicating besides the verbal message. 

A lot of estimates are that that’s where the majority of communication happens. I’ve never estimated it myself, but I’ve always found that the nonverbals and the visual communication — particularly in debates, but also in other formats, like the president speaking after a crisis event. I’ve done a lot of experiments where we’ll show some kind of threat against the US. And then we’ll show a politician acting either kind of subdued and very low-potency, I would call it, or very activated and high-potency, which is Trump’s mode continuously. And it’s usually the high-potency mode in relation to the manageable threat that gets the best response. 

What it does is it reduces anxiety, and it also increases confidence towards the speaker. [For example], you have a subdued communicator like George W. Bush, in the early moments of 9/11, when he shows up looking surprised at the Air Force base. You have a threat environment that looks overwhelming and it’s just going to hell: the towers coming down in New York. That puts people into heightened anxiety, and it’s not calming at all. 

But what happened here was somehow Trump makes it look manageable. He bounces right back, so he’s performing the presidential, the leader reaction to the news action. The news action was the attempted assassination, and he’s performing in real time something I would probably set up experimentally as the strong condition of anxiety-mitigating, confidence-boosting. He just did it instinctively. So, like a lot of people, I think it’s going to help certainly in the short term. And it’s gonna hurt Biden, because I think the polling gap is going to get bigger now.

Can you speak a little to the way that the imagery Biden tends to fall back on compares to what we see from Trump?

There’s not agenticness to it. You notice the lack of energy every once in a while. He tries to do something scripted or within a toolkit right now. He can kind of punch the air when he’s got a teleprompter in front of him and he’s confident in what he needs to be saying. But he’s not the old Joe that I grew up with on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Even running for president in 2008 and becoming vice president. He seemed already at that point like a senior statesman, but he still had a lot of energy, performed very well in the vice presidential debates and represented US interests. He was one of our better vice presidents. People knew about him and he contributed. But he’s lost a step. 

So there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s almost the exact opposite of what Trump’s still able to do. Joe used to be able to do it and was very good at it. And now he will only allow himself to be seen in certain settings. He did a live press conference, but there were still some misspoken phrases and people’s names and titles he got confused. And you don’t really see him outside of the setting of a podium anymore.

At this point, visually, Joe’s lost the election already. He just doesn’t look like a leader anymore. 

It’s funny you’re describing it as a lack of energy. Is this where the nickname Sleepy Joe Biden comes from? Does Trump instinctively pick up on these dynamics?

He did it to Nancy Pelosi, too. He’ll try to exaggerate, almost like in a newspaper cartoonist way, anybody’s kind of subtle tic or literally physical situation. There was Little Marco. He’ll take one example of one misrepresentation and suddenly [it’s] Lyin’ Ted Cruz. 

But his instinct when he criticizes is also very, very much at the level not of policy and not of high-minded discourse. It’s usually the level of character traits and physical putdowns around people’s situation. He made fun of a handicapped New York Times reporter once. It outraged people on the left. 

Trump goes for the visual and nonverbal jugular, which is why Biden at this point just doesn’t have the stamina any more or the nonverbal presence to really match Trump’s energy. I was a little bit surprised in 2020 that Biden pulled it off the way he did, but he still had enough fortitude and pushed back [with] an agenticness to survive those two debates. In this past debate, it just wasn’t there.

Do you think this is the kind of image that could change the mind of an undecided voter about Trump?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I think it can certainly open up a positive frame on Trump. The other frames might have been January 6, or if people have already forgotten about that, it might have been, “What is this Project 2025 business?” or “Who is this guy that’s constantly belittling and beating up on everybody?” But Trump’s even pulled back from that now during the debate. He just let Joe be Joe for the most part. 

I do think it gives credence to some of Trump’s rhetoric, which is, “I’m a victim and they’re out to get me.” Somebody was clearly out to get him. But also: “I can withstand it and I don’t know if anybody else can.”

It evokes for an undecided voter some really deeper themes in American politics, which are: heroes survive. Teddy Roosevelt was shot at and he continued his speech. “That’s not gonna be enough! I got the strength of a bull moose!” George Washington was famous for not ever taking a bullet in the Revolutionary War. How did that happen? It contributed to his mystique. 

So now Trump’s got a mystique. And also some credence to the arguments of “I’m being victimized” or “I’m being targeted here.” Even though the rhetoric on the right has been much harsher and more violent than the rhetoric on the left. I mean, Sarah Palin used targets in some of her campaign advertising. Trump said himself that “the Second Amendment people” ought to take care of Hillary Clinton. Unbelievable kind of comments. But now, because he was targeted, it’s easy for him to say, “It’s all been the left the whole time.”

Even though there’s no evidence this has anything to do with the left at all?

For somebody not paying that close of attention, only hearing little snippets and sound bites and images and watching TikToks and short videos, suddenly it looks more palatable to see Trump as a resilient figure really battling for other people, putting himself on the line and not giving in even when they come after them. I do think it has a potential to persuade some people. Not everybody. But if you’re completely undecided and a very low-information voter, it’s not going to hurt.

It’s what we would call — these only come around once in a while — an iconic image. An iconic image is one that is universally understood without any caption. In fact, a caption would compromise it. It would narrow the understanding or narrow the interpretation that the viewer already has of it and the instant understanding.

You think of the soldiers putting up the flag at Iwo Jima. Whether that was staged — doesn’t matter. It’s an iconic image. Firemen putting up the flag in the rubble of 9/11 outside the World Trade Center. Napalm girl being attacked from the sky by an American jet, of all things. 

Trump has an iconic image. One for the ages, that is instantly recognizable. It’s already been tweeted millions of times and there’s no way to forget it if you saw it. It was on T-shirts within a couple hours of the event happening. 

It’s going to be his brand now. He’s always looking for a new packaging vehicle. And it’s ironic and I’m sure the would-be assassin didn’t intend this, but basically he just gave Trump a marketing gift. Which is a really weird way of looking at it! But that’s where we are in today’s media politics, which are again hypermediatized. 

A moment in American political history was caught in real time that people aren’t going to be able to forget. It’s monumental in that sense. 

It’s gonna encapsulate the campaign. It makes it really clear Biden doesn’t hold a candle to this force called Trump that’s out there. That doesn’t mean that things are gonna stay this way permanently, but for the next little while it’s Donald Trump’s momentum to lose. We’ll see how far that goes.