President Donald Trump turned heads Saturday after a photograph of him stepping off Air Force One went viral online, an image that appeared to show the president with a drastically different look.
“What in the world is going on with Trump’s hair?” asked independent journalist Aaron Rupar Saturday in a social media post on X.
The photograph in question was taken by photojournalist Jim Watson of Agence France Presse (AFP) on Friday, and shows Trump waving to reporters as he steps off of Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey. What caught onlookers’ attention almost immediately was the shade of Trump’s hair, which appeared brown with hints of gray as opposed to its typical blonde sheen.
“Trump is now a brunette!” declared journalist Molly Jong-Fast in a social media post on X to her nearly 1 million followers.
HuffPost White House correspondent Shirish V. Dáte joked about Trump’s new hair color with a question, asking if the White House was able to “certify that no animals were harmed in this process,” and George Conway, a prominent lawyer and political commentator, quipped that “something needs to be done about [Trump’s] hair under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.”
The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols admitted that, while “not the most important thing in the world,” Trump’s apparent hair color change was odd, and comedian Samantha Ruddy submitted her own theory for the apparent hair change.
“He’s going through it. It was time for a change,” Ruddy wrote in a social media post on X to her more than 43,000 followers.
Speculation about Trump's hair has circulated for decades, largely tied to reporting on an alleged 1989 scalp reduction surgery detailed in Harry Hurt III's 1993 biography, Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump. According to that reporting, Trump's then-wife Ivana Trump testified in a 1990 divorce deposition that Trump was in significant pain following the procedure.
Trump is now a brunette! https://t.co/j88fJIOSPG
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) September 5, 2026