Donald Trump is physically decomposing. He’s so decrepit he can barely move from one golf cart to another, making his latest club championship a true work of art – the art of fiction. But there’s one part of him that’s more robust than ever: His hair.
His elaborate coif wasn’t doing much to hide his hair loss in recent months, until suddenly last week he had a much bushier mane. It’s not the worst toupee I’ve ever seen, but the lack of subtlety puts it in the running, and it quickly launched a thousand memes.
I took it as another example of his sad, laughable vanity, but for his niece, Mary Trump, it triggered a family memory. She told podcaster Dean Obeidallah,
“What’s really interesting about it to me is that my grandfather had a receding hairline from the time he was a teenager. He was always very self-conscious about it, but you know he wasn’t bald. He just had a receding hairline. He still had a decent amount of hair when he was in his 80s, but then he got Alzheimer’s, and suddenly he wanted more hair. So he got an extremely ill-fitting toupee. And my family, especially Donald, found this absolutely embarrassing.
To be fair, Trump was much younger when he started worrying about his diminishing locks. Ivanka spilled the beans to friends, according to Michael Wolff, about his scalp reduction surgery and Just For Men hair dye that he left in too long, giving him that orange aura.
Considering that he’s known to like Broadway musicals and female nudity, I’m guessing he was a fan of “Hair” – maybe not during its original four-year run, because he was no hippie, but surely he saw one of its revivals.
As with many of the tunes from the show, a pop band’s version made the title song a chart hit, though this was probably the most incongruous band to capitalize on the fad. You’ll notice that nobody in that group caricature of the Cowsills sports long hair. The family band was about as square as a pop group could be in 1969, yet they covered this hippie anthem. The single reached No. 2 in Billboard and No. 1 in Cashbox, the last song the Cowsills ever placed in the Top 40.
