On Aug. 24, 2023, former president Donald Trump was booked at an Atlanta jail on felony charges — including racketeering, false statements, and forgery — over his attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. After his mugshot was released online, white nationalist and Trump loyalist Nick Fuentes declared the photo was a “symbol” to “rally behind” like the swastika or hammer and sickle.

“And so this is just like — and I think everyone already recognizes [it], I’m not the first person to say this — but this has become now an icon and a symbol of this moment,” he said on his America First show. “I think people are rallying around this. And it would be stupid for him not to monetize it.”

The Trump campaign is, of course, selling merchandise with his mugshot with the slogan “Never surrender.”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a given. The Georgia — the Fulton County courthouse has given him the symbol,” Fuentes continued. “This is like giving him a swastika. He didn’t have a swastika. He didn’t have a hammer and sickle. He didn’t have a — whatever. Whatever the great symbol — he didn’t have a bloody shirt or a flag, really, to rally behind.”

“Waving the bloody shirt” is a Reconstruction-era phrase that was used to “dismiss Republican attempts at upholding Reconstruction and holding Southerners accountable for their acts of mass violence.”

Fuentes called the mugshot a “symbol of defiance against the system.” He added that, “This is what the election is about. In a way it’s about that picture. Because the picture summarizes all the events of the last eight years, and the eight years are a culmination of 30 years or even longer of what’s been going on — which is that this country is being killed by its leadership.”

He said Trump’s mugshot depicts the “face of America” which is “being punished” and “chopped up.”

“Meanwhile, as we all know, the country is in decline,” he complained. “Meanwhile, what is celebrated is vulgarity and indecency and crime and obese people and transsexual people. They tear down the statues of the heroes and they change the holidays, and they uplift criminals. We worship thugs. Worship deranged freaks.”