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Is It Fair To Ridicule Trump On His Looks, Part II: The Flappening

By Emily Cutler | Politics | February 9, 2018 |

By Emily Cutler | Politics | February 9, 2018 |


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Remember all the way back, before the election, when True Detective was good? Or maybe not good, but we were all too hopped up on the McConaissance to notice that maybe it was less “good” and more “cool sounding”? Anyway, they said that thing about time being a flat circle. Which still doesn’t make any actual sense, since time is actually the fourth dimension, but fuck if I haven’t noticed a lot of repeating elements in my life.

Which bring me to today’s topic: Is it Ok to mock the President for the way he looks. I answered this question on a larger basis roughly a year ago, but recently, events have occurred that have brought the debate center stage again. I refer, of course, to The Flappening:

And listen, the first commenter to say some nonsense about how making fun of bald men is cruel is getting a “Boooooo” gif response. No one is making fun of Trump for being bald. No one is even implying that being bald is a bad thing when it’s done by a stone cold fox like Corey Stoll

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But when it’s a creeper like Stephen Miller it’s mockable.

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Sidenote: Can someone get on that Stoll-Greer romcom? Because I need it.

Bald is fine, bald is good, bald is sometimes even beautiful (again, specifically bald women. Again that might just be me.) But this isn’t about being bald. It’s about being a goddamn liar.

Trump is lying to us, and doing so very, very poorly. He keeps insisting that he doesn’t wear a toupee. As though this is actually any better.

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THAT IS HOW HE INTENTIONALLY MAKES HIS HAIR LOOK. HE BELIEVES THIS IS BETTER THAN ADMITTING HE’S JUST BALD. And that idea? That’s totally mock-worthy. Mocking someone for aspects of their appearance over which they have no control and drawing inferences about their worth as a human being is cruel and superficial. Being cruel and superficial is mockable. No one is arguing that Trump is a bad person because he’s bald. We’re arguing that he is a bad person because he values appearances, and how those appearances fit into a very narrowly defined category of good (bald = bad; having hair, even hair that is so unnatural in its appearance that people have openly stated they believe it is fake = good) significantly more than he values … anything? He values it more than literally anything else in the world, I’m pretty sure? Also because he’s just a terrible person in many, many ways. You know, the racism and sexual assault and destructive xenophobia and cruelty.

So, yeah, mock away. The wind that day didn’t reveal that Trump is bald (of course he’s bald). It revealed (to a somewhat greater degree) that he’s a shallow, vain, superficial liar, who thinks he’s somehow fooling an entire nation of people into believing he’s got great hair even though we can see him. The Emperor Has No Hair, and I’m cool with laughing at how foolish that makes him.