November 16, 2020, 7:04 am
President Trump’s recent press conference about the pandemic had people paying a lot more attention to his hair than his words.
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Something seemed different about the president as soon as he walked to the podium, and it wasn’t just his somber demeanor likely due to the results of the election. His hair had gone full shining gray, a stark contrast to the jarring yellow he’s sported through the majority of his presidency.
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Watching the press conference live, it was easy to wonder if this was perhaps merely a trick of the light, but people on Twitter soon confirmed it was the same across all the networks carrying Trump’s speech. The president had indeed gone gray.
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Trump had been laying low since the election, but the last time the public had seen him, his hair was certainly still yellow.
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Looks like Trump’s hair went gray with Warp Speed…
— Cyrus McQueen (@CyrusMMcQueen) November 13, 2020
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The most prominent theory as to why the sudden change is that Trump is trying to switch up his image to garner sympathy — either because he wants people to think he’s working hard to fight COVID-19 all of a sudden, or because he wants them to keep fighting the fake “voter fraud” he keeps accusing his “enemy” Americans of engaging in, or simply to prep for a potential criminal trial once he’s bounced out of office.
I think Trump didn’t color his hair because he knows most presidents go gray/white in office and he wants to look distinguished and like he did a lot of work.
— JEN KIRKMAN
(@JenKirkman) November 14, 2020
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Either way, it’s certainly a new look for him, and a choice, at that. There has only been one previous occasion on which he has been seen with white/gray hair as president, and Vogue deemed that decision to be due to wanting to be seen as more sympathetic as COVID-19 concerns began to ramp up in March.
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“What I think might be happening is a kind of manipulation of the American public in which he is attempting to show citizens that he is suffering as well,” historian Alexis Coe told Vogue at the time. “It’s about optics — Trump trying to distract from his late, dangerous, and sometimes fatal messaging around coronavirus.”
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By now, it’s all too little, too late, if that is Trump’s ploy. The election is over — despite his insistence otherwise — and with nearly a quarter million Americans dead from the virus, history will not look kindly on his tenure, no matter what color his hair might be.
*First Published: November 16, 2020, 7:04 am
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