The release of former President Donald Trump’s mug shot last week, which plastered his faux-tough guy grimace across every screen in America, did more to solidify his position within the Republican Party than anything he could have done on his own. Indeed, the ongoing persecution and prosecution of Trump is more useful to his political prospects than if he’d bought a Big Mac for every worker in Iowa and kissed every baby in New Hampshire.

There's even speculation the photo will earn him more endorsements from celebrity rappers than he’s already received — Benny the Butcher pledged his vote for Trump following the release, joining Lil’ Wayne, Lil’ Pump, DaBaby, and of course, Kanye West. For a guy whose only “get out of jail free” card is a White House win, the free media generated by the widely circulated mug shot is pure music.

Democrats and their media allies are popping the champagne, too. Most Americans still don’t know that the Democratic Party spent tens of millions of dollars in the 2022 Republican primaries to prop up MAGA candidates who were easily beatable in the general election. In nine key battleground states alone, the Democratic Party spent $53 million on ads toward this end.

It was an ingenious and deeply cynical move that reduced the much-ballyhooed red wave to a measly trickle.

The Trump indictments are best understood as an extension of this strategy. They guarantee the media will spend most of its election coverage relitigating the Trump years instead of the Biden years, which is exactly what Democrats want. They are betting that "Operation MAGA Boost” still has plenty of legs. And who could blame them?

Of course, this is an unmitigated disaster for a nation with grave problems at home and abroad.

America should be discussing how best to salvage an education system that has tanked to unthinkable levels in the post-pandemic era — only 13% of students nationwide meet proficiency standards in U.S. history and civics, and only 34% are proficient in reading . Or how to solve the border crisis, which now sees an average of 10,000 attempted illegal crossings per day. Instead, for the next 18 months, the nation will be force-fed updates on Trump’s "final battle" by overwrought CNN anchors pretending to be shocked — shocked! — by the indecency of it all.

The flipside of Trump’s cartoonish scowl is Jake Tapper’s pretentious grimace.

There are only three winners in the neverending Trump psychodrama: Democratic politicians, legacy media outlets, and of course, Trump himself. Like adversaries in professional wrestling, the lumps they deliver one another are real, but they are preordained and designed for maximum dramatic effect.

At the end of the day, everyone gets paid.

Democrats get an eminently beatable opponent with a fixed favorability ceiling and who also deflects attention away from their crumbling cities, failing schools, and widely detested cultural innovations. Legacy media outlets get the clicks and views that enable them to stave off extinction for one more election cycle. And Trump gets to remain the star of the national drama, which is more important to him than freedom (had he declined to seek another term, the partisan Justice Department would have likely declined the politically risky prosecution of a former president), and already more demoralizing and laborious than the final season of Game of Thrones.

Trump will face as many as six trials during the primary season, including one scheduled the very day before Super Tuesday . Even if one of Trump’s Republican primary challengers were to suddenly strike a nerve and gain momentum before the all-important primary bonanza, media coverage of Trump’s post-election activities in Georgia would bump him or her offstage and rile up the listless vessel MAGA mob .

The script is already written, the winners preselected. The losers are too numerous to mention — there are approximately 330 million of them. Wake me up when it’s over.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.