Hair farce one! Time for lift-off, Mr Trump
LIKE a child’s candy floss snatched away by the wind, the famous mop is whipped towards the heavens.
And there, below, we have it. An embarrassing glimpse of what lies below the most notorious combover in modern hair history.
All it took was an unfortunate gust of wind as he climbed the steps of Air Force One, and President Trump’s fleshy pink scalp was exposed to the elements – a swathe of balding pate, stretching from the top of his scalp, down to the nape of his neck and across.
It was almost like Trump’s crowning glory had developed a life of its own as it wafted upwards and outwards, giving a fascinating glimpse behind the normally carefully-combed, sprayed and coiffed front. And it was all caught on film.
But just what does that terrifying (who didn’t cringe when they watched that video clip?) glimpse of President Trump’s thinning locks reveal about his less-than-luscious locks?
In Michael Wolff’s contested book Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House, he wrote that Trump’s daughter Ivanka had confirmed claims – first made by her mother Ivana during her divorce battle with Trump – that he has had scalp-reduction surgery in which balding areas are removed and the remainder stretched.
The result? A clean pate surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front from which all the ends are ‘drawn up to meet in the centre and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray’.
But Iain Sallis, a trichologist at The Hair Medic Clinic, says it’s not possible to tell whether Trump has gone under the knife.
‘You’d have to get up really close to the scalp to see,’ he says. ‘It was quite the thing in the Eighties and if he has had it done it’s likely it would have been back then.’
Mr Sallis says that the most telling information to be gleaned from the clip, reportedly filmed on Friday as the president made his regular weekend trip to his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago, is that he has the genetic hair-loss gene (his father sported a similar style) and that he is ‘acutely aware of it’.
Earlier this month Trump told Piers Morgan: ‘People find it hard to believe it’s my hair but it is. It’s hanging in, barely, it’s hanging in.’
Following his first presidential physical last month, Mr Trump’s US military doctor announced that the 71-year-old takes the hair-loss drug finasteride.
The ‘leader of the free world’ has also admitted to colouring his hair (‘I just don’t like grey hair,’ he once said). According to Fire And Fury, he uses Just for Men and it’s just impatience that leads to that often orange hue – an unfortunate result of not leaving the lotion on long enough.
‘At the end of the day he’s an alpha male and his hair is very important to him,’ says Mr Sallis. ‘This may say something about his reliance on his outer image, his hair is like his psychological armour. His hair is more elaborate than Bobby Charlton’s combover, he’s not read the memo that people don’t do that any more – or he’s chosen to ignore it.’
As for the president, who is notoriously touchy about his blonde locks, he said in an interview in Playboy back in 2004 that it was his then girlfriend Melania who cuts his hair. ‘She’s much more artistic than my hair would indicate,’ he said. ‘But she believes that if you like something the way it is, you should leave it. She doesn’t fool with the hair. She’s not trying to reinvent the wheel.’
And his routine? ‘I get up, take a shower and wash my hair. Then I read the newspapers and watch the news on television, and slowly the hair dries. It takes about an hour. I don’t use a blow-dryer. Once it’s dry I comb it. Once I have it the way I like it – even though nobody else likes it – I spray it and it’s good for the day.’
As long as it’s not too breezy …