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.
