President Donald Trump received a brutal parade of mockery in The Guardian on Friday, over his recent temper tantrum about how he looked on the cover of Time Magazine.
Trump took particular offense at how thin and insubstantial his hair looked in the photo, raging, "They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird! I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?”
"Donald Trump’s latest tirade is, at its core, about his own battle with the ravages of time. Literally and figuratively," wrote Dave Schilling. "Once again, Trump has come face to face with what he actually looks like, which would terrify and enrage just about anyone. When he’s not obsessing over the afterlife, Trump spends an inordinate amount of time kvetching about his appearance. First, it was a painting that made him look like a time-traveling Tudor monarch who just got kicked out of a Sizzler buffet line. Now, he’s directed his ire at Time magazine, which put him on the cover in tribute to his efforts to broker peace in Gaza" — even though the article was one of his most complimentary writeups in mainstream media in a long time.
In Time's photo, Schilling wrote, "Trump’s signature metallic yellow wave of hair looks thin and wispy, like someone dumped a handful of dry angel hair pasta on his head as a college prank."
Trump has been rather notorious throughout his public career, even long before he became president, for flaunting his peculiar hairstyle, so his fury over being confronted with this unflattering image makes plenty of sense, wrote Schilling: "I recognize that the natural first reaction to realizing you’re losing your hair is to be angry about it. Surely, it must be someone else’s fault. It’s the angles or the lighting. The reality is what it is, though, and it’s better to live in the world than to imagine it as something else. The man is nearly 80."
Indeed, wrote Schilling, Trump ought to make the most of it and do what he has done with every other facet of his personality and public office: cash in.
"Spin this negative into a positive and let Trump – who has already successfully sold his fans hats, steaks, fake college educations, wine and an imploding economy – endorse a pill for bald guys. From pain comes profit," wrote Schilling. "What’s more American than that?"
