Trump’s mysterious hair

A piece at the Daily Mail explains Donald Trump’s amazing hair style as a combover, meaning that the hair is arranged to conceal baldness. I don’t think that is true. My impression is that Trump has a lot of hair. Indeed, it’s only with a lot of hair that he could maintain that one-of-a-kind, how-do-you-describe-it Trump look. I could be wrong, but if I am, Trump’s hair is the greatest act of concealment in history.

Trump is in the minds of the Brits because earlier this week he visited his mother’s native Scotland for the first time in his post-infant life—for all of three hours—and stopped by for a brief visit—maybe 15 minutes?—with his first cousins at the house where his mother was born. He didn’t even enter the house, because, as he said, he didn’t want his relatives to think he was inspecting the place. He was there because he is promoting a huge golf course in Scotland. A lot of family feeling, this guy.

While Trump’s hair is an object of fascination at the moment, the true mystery hair of our time is Al Gore’s.

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Erich writes:

What fascinates about his hair is how it manifests a paradoxical optical effect: it looks like it is simultaneously combed forward and back. I have stared at it in photos and on TV and cannot tell which way it is combed. It can’t be both.

LA replies:

Exactly. It’s sui generis. It seems to come forward onto his forehead, and then to flip backward in some gravity defying manner, but that seems to be against nature and one can’t be sure that one is seeing what one is seeing.

But I think Erich’s description is more accurate: you look at it and can’t tell whether it’s going forward or backward.

And, at least as seems to me, he has to have very abundant hair to pull off this effect. It’s the opposite of a balding head with a conventional comb-over.

Also, I’ve been told that Trump has shown his hair to reporters on TV, shown the roots, to demonstrate that he has a full head of hair.

Erich replies:

“of course he has to have a lot of hair to pull this off.”

Or just some fantastically baroque wig. [LA replies: Impossible, as anyone can see from his hair blowing around in Scotland in the Mail story.]

“I’ve been told that Trump has shown his hair to reporters, shown the roots, so that they would understand that he has a full head of hair.”

If I were a billionaire, I would be tempted to offer him some obscene amount of money just to have him take both hands and run them through his hair, pushing it back off his forehead, and film this for posterity. (Ditto for Ted Koppel.)

LA replies:

Yes, Koppel is another whose hair is an ongoing mystery, seemingly not part of the natural order of things, yet not artificial either. His hair, the shape of his head, as well as his voice and personality—it’s all too strange. My own theory is that he comes from another planet.

Carol Iannone writes:

The solution to the Al Gore mystery seems to lie in the insistence on careful placement of photographers and camera operators. I read a reporter once who said something like this, that he had to move from a certain place because the angle of the camera would show the flattened area where the hair had thinned. But from the proper angle, the hair would look full.

LA replies:

That still does not cxplain how, if he is very bald in back, the hair is still thick in front, yet doesn’t look at all like a replacement.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 11, 2008 01:53 PM | Send