I stayed to watch Trump work the line. Up close, in person, the hair is much more intricate than it appears on screen. Its construction is tripartite, its significance polyvalent. First and foremost, there is the comb-over, although it can be called a comb-over only in the sense that the mall in Dubai with a ski hill inside it can be called a building. It is hair as state-of-the-art engineering feat, with the diaphanous quality of a cloak out of Norse legend or some miraculous near-weightless metal developed in an advanced German laboratory. It floats over the skull, an act of defiance not only against ageing and loss but against time and space, against reality.
Behind the technical display of the comb-over, as counterpoint, the back is as traditional and old-fashioned as a haircut can be. It’s a classic ducktail. It’s such a classic that I have only seen it in movies set in the 1950s. Not movies from the 1950s I should be clear, but movies from the 1970s about the 1950s. In between the comb-over and the ducktail, between the two follicular spaces representing the modernistic and the atavistic, the fantastical and the nostalgic, there is a third tranche. Even in person you have to look closely to catch sight of it. It bulges, slightly but only slightly. It is the real part of the hair, the human part, the actual hair. It is the hinge of Donald Trump.