What Trump’s big new yellow hair tells us

Donald Trump has never made a secret of his blond ambition, using Twitter in 2013 to proclaim: “As everybody knows, but the haters & losers refuse to acknowledge, I do not wear a ‘wig.’ My hair may not be perfect but it’s mine.” And it’s true – like him or loathe him, Trump’s undulating custard locks have always added to the bombastic iconography – orange complexion, campy-brash Queens snarl, long red tie, Grinchy smile – that he uses to command attention. This weekend, something changed, though. American political pundit (and former Obama speechwriter) Jon Favreau noted that “Our 80-year-old President appears to have grown a new head of hair overnight”. Indeed, while signing his executive order to curb birthright citizenship on Thursday 6 August, he was sporting a short, feathery pale candyfloss do, with both greying temples and visible (pale) scalp beneath. And yet, just two days later, at a roundtable on mining, his hair was thicker, more lustrous, turmeric yellow and as densely furry as a slab of asbestos. The false equivalence between blonde hair and purity has long been a staple of far-right and even fascist politics, as has the imagery of long-locked strongmen ever since Samson confessed: “If my head were shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any other man.” More recently, the blonde-bobbed He-Man entertained children of the early 1980s, Fabio graced the covers of every horny novel of the 1990s, and 40-year-old Brad Pitt gave a dazzlingly meaty turn as Achilles in Troy back in 2004. Shorts While younger men will be turning to long-term looksmaxxed-approved options like microneedling and minoxidil to stave off male pattern balding, or even booking trips to Turkey for discounted hair transplant procedures, Trump seems to have gone for a far swifter option. So what has he been up to? And what does it say about his politics at a time when he’s trying to simultaneously broker deals with Iran and Israel amid a global fuel crisis and, er, reflecting on the rushed job of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool? Men’s stylist Nick Hems told The i Paper: “Trump has always understood the power of his personal brand, which has been built around strength, success and control. “Hair is one of the strongest visual markers of ageing in men, so maintaining a fuller head of hair helps protect his identity and the brand he has spent decades creating. His hair, tailoring and tan are all part of the Trump brand, and he will fight to maintain them all, I suspect, because they make him feel confident, powerful and in control of how he presents himself to the world. “With a career built on visibility, and not being shy of criticism or ridicule, he knows it all keeps him recognisable and talked about.” Meanwhile Paul Cochrane, who runs Cochrane and Co, a London-based hair systems styling business, says that this is more than a dye-job, adding: “It does look like he may have an interlaced hair system”, which “ is something like ladies wear, and lots of the old big rock stars used to wear them from the 70s and 80s”. “It’s a lace-based system with hair sewn into it, then this is placed on the head, his natural hair is pulled through the holes, and it is all blow-dried expertly to give it volume and style.” The part of Trump’s hair that makes Cochrane suspect this system is it being “quite heavy” around the temples, and “suspiciously too good…not many people of 80 years of age have a great head of hair”. Cochrane cites that Trump has for decades required “long hair at the back to cover up the scar” he reportedly acquired during a botched scalp reduction he underwent in the late 1980s, as claimed by his biographer Harry Hurt III. So we have a decent idea of the aesthetic choices that are being made atop Trump’s bonce, but what are the political implications? ‘You never think that he must be too busy to think about the mundane stuff of life – that is what animates him and drives him,’ says journalist Jon Sopel (Photo: John Locher/AP) Thomas Gift, associate professor and founding director of the Centre on US Politics at University College London, says that Trump’s approach to personal aesthetic really is redolent of his political strategies. “Trump’s hair is essentially the physical manifestation of his foreign policy: bigger, more unpredictable, and apparently unconstrained by any law of nature.” “More seriously,” Gift adds, “Trump’s hair has always been part of his larger than life personality. It’s deliberately conspicuous, slightly absurd, and impossible to neglect. In that way, it’s strikingly consistent with the man himself.” Jon Sopel, a presenter on political podcast The News Agents, has been “very up close and personal” with Trump’s hair during a Republican presidential candidates’ debate in August 2015, when he was the BBC’s North America correspondent. “We all just converged on him, and it was film crews, reporters, radio mics, boom mics, and my nose was in his neck, and all I could smell was hairspray.” “He’s got this kind of 1950s kind of quiff style rock’n’roll bad boy sort of image, and the other day it looked like he had a syrup on his head. “To him everything’s about winners and losers, you’ve got to look like a winner. He cares massively about this stuff – you just have to see the foundation that he wears, he won’t go anywhere unless he has a full foundation base on,” claims Sopel. “He doesn’t care that people take the piss out of it, it’s just part of who he is, the confected part of how he wants to sell himself to the world…I’m not surprised that when you get photos of it looking all thin and wispy, that the vanity of the man wants to project that he’s not 80 years old…what the hair looks like is vitally important. “You never think that he must be too busy to think about the mundane stuff of life – that is what animates him and drives him. The detailed negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz and what’s happening with the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are, frankly, occupying very little of his brain space.” Well, at least the brain steering much of the world’s oil prices, geopolitical stability and trade potential is being kept cocooned by new hair. Over the weekend, as Trump attended the LIV Golf tournament in New York, he kept a white and gold “USA” cap atop whatever he’s done to whatever is left of his hair, before returning to a windy Washington airstrip with the same cap in place.