This is an extract from a longer piece in The New Yorker . Last year, I just caught up. I kept all the juiciest parts and left the science behind. That’s how it’s done in America these days. Take the shortcut to the nearest glitter. – JDW
By Amos Barshad.
In 2013—German researchers published a study indicating that men experienced hair loss as an “enormous emotional burden” that could lead to an “impaired quality of life” and “psychological disorders.” Inversely, one study has shown that people perceive men with bountiful hair as likely having big penises.
People are also much, much more likely to vote for political candidates with hair. Only five elected American Presidents—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, James Garfield, and Dwight Eisenhower—were bald or balding. Considering that eighty-five per cent of men older than fifty suffer hair loss, that’s an astonishing record.
It is no surprise that Donald Trump is obsessed with hair loss. “Never let yourself go bald,” he once told a Trump Organization executive. “The worst thing a man can do is go bald.” During their brief dalliance, Stormy Daniels confronted him about his hair. “I was like, ‘Dude, what’s up with that?’ ” she said, to In Touch, in 2011. Trump laughed. Then he told her that he worried that “if he cut his hair or changed it, that he would lose his power and his wealth.” Recently, Trump’s physician admitted that the President takes the anti-baldness medicine Propecia.
These days, when forced into windy outdoor situations, Trump is nearly always seen wearing a Make America Great Again cap. But, one wintry, blustery day this February, Trump walked up the steps of Air Force One capless. In the engrossing video footage, you can see the hair on the back of Trump’s head part and rise, shooting up with power, almost in two separate flaps—one to the left, one to the right.
In just the past few years, we’ve made remarkable strides in understanding Trump’s head. In March, 2016, with Trump the presumptive G.O.P. nominee, Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg published a diligent and compelling investigation, “Is Donald Trump’s Hair a $60,000 Weave?” It pointed to a high-end clinic called Ivari International that, for a while, at least, had the kind of complicated ties to Trump and Trump Tower that we’d later see in the dignitaries of various hostile foreign governments.
The contention could never be definitively proved. “Gawker was arguing it’s some crosshatched weave that went beyond normal combing,” Gersh Kuntzman, a semi-professional hair historian, said. “I studied weaves. If you look at it from any angle, it is something of an elaborate, multifaceted combover.”
In Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” Kuntzman’s theory is bolstered. Wolff writes that Ivanka Trump “often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”
I’d come to think that the simplest answer was the right one: this was regular male-pattern baldness, elaborately covered up. But the Air Force One incident only deepened the mystery. What kind of hair afflicted by male-pattern baldness rises in the back? I suddenly had no idea which parts of his head contained which hairs. Watching the flaps on the back of his head shoot up again and again, I became unmoored in my beliefs.
A few weeks after the Air Force One incident, while addressing a crowd at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump caught himself on a giant monitor. Immediately, he checked his hair. What secrets were these camera angles exposing? Then—as far as I can tell, for the first time ever—he admitted to hair loss. “Oh, I try like hell to hide that bald spot, folks,” he said. “I work hard at it. Hey, we are hanging in, we are hanging in, we are hanging in there. Right? Together, we are hanging in.”
Where is the bald spot? What exactly are the dimensions of this bald spot? It’s all so stupid, so tiringly stupid. In May, Trump’s former personal physician, Harold Bornstein, revealed that Trump had sent people to seize all of his personal health records. Bornstein called it a “raid” that left him feeling “raped, frightened, and sad.” He also claimed that it was revenge for having revealed to the media that Trump was on Propecia.
Why lie to us? Trump’s head is the ugly extreme end of a national obsession. “Why are we still going down this road?” Gersh Kuntzman asked, during our conversation. “You’re always looking for something . . . . The hair is always greener on the other guy’s head. But if you actually go to a shrink and do work on yourself—”
It needs to be said: on Kuntzman’s own head there was a full, nicely salt-and-peppered head of hair. And so, yes, perhaps that meant his self-affirmation spiel was flawed. But I couldn’t help but be moved.
“I’m Gersh fucking Kuntzman!” he bellowed. “I say that every day!”