Trump in increasing legal peril one month on from Mar-a-Lago search

The photo released by the justice department of materials seized at his resort sends a message: the time for frivolity is over

The photo tells it all. There is the overabundance of the carpet in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's Florida resort, with its elaborate floral design presumably intended to suggest taste and luxury but merely signaling excess.

There is the tackiness of the cheap gilded frames stuck in a box on the right of the picture, an echo of the golden skin plastered all over Trump Tower in Manhattan. In the front frame, the ego of the owner rings out - it is a Time magazine cover from 2019 showing Trump's Democratic presidential challengers, Joe Biden among them, peering enviously at him as he sits in the Oval Office.