'Never surrender': How Trump turned his mug shot into GOP's rallying cry

The mugshot taken of Donald Trump when he was booked at the Fulton County jail after being charged in his Georgia election interference criminal case has become an iconic image for his supporters, emblazoned on T-shirts, mugs and can coolers marketed by the Trump campaign.

The Georgia case comes on top of other criminal charges leveled at Trump, such as the New York hush-money case in which he's accused of falsifying business records to pay off an adult film star he allegedly had an affair with, and the Florida classified documents case where he's accused of illegally storing classified documents from his presidency at his resort in Palm Beach.

Speaking to The Washington Post, Trump supporter Orlando Perez says that wearing a shirt with Trump's mugshot is "a middle finger to all the indictments."

“We can see through all the indictments thrown his way, the lies and the BS. It’s making him stronger," he added.

But according to former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who has become a vocal Trump critic, Trump is "no different from any other criminal defendant."

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“In a general election it becomes more difficult because as we’ve already seen in primaries so far, independents and more centrist voters don’t appreciate it and are in many cases repulsed by it," Steele told The Post.

The Trump campaign has gone all-in with the mugshot and it's appearing everywhere at Trump rallies.

“President Trump’s mug shot serves as a reminder to the American people that Joe Biden is weaponizing our Justice Department against his opponent, and that despite enduring these unprecedented political attacks, President Trump continues to fight to secure our border, rebuild our economy, and end the chaos that Biden’s weakness has created around the world,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told The Post.

While it's still not clear how Trump's indictments will affect his chances for becoming president again, professor emeritus of journalism at New York University, Mitchell Stephens, said the mugshot is an example of Trump's ability to turn a negative event into a rallying cry to his supporters.

“If Donald Trump has a political skill, it’s in taking obvious areas in which he has done a terrible job and in which he’s done wrong things and trying to twist them into positive things for his audience, for his followers who seem to enjoy his defiance,” Stephens told The Post. “It’s a pretty good example of that.”

Georgia-based GOP consultant Brian Robinson said the mugshot has the same effect as when Hillary Clinton described Trump's supporters as "deplorables."

“All of a sudden you had people wearing T-shirts saying ‘I’m a deplorable.’ It’s a way of mocking your detractors,” he said.

Even Trump himself knew the photo he took that day in Fulton County would be powerful.

“You only get one shot. You don’t get to take it again," he reportedly said.