Let us begin with the silverware.
Donald Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States, Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in human history, leader of the free world to the extent the free world will still accept the designation, throws away silverware. Not accidentally. Not in the heat of a moment. He throws it away because he is done with it and it is there and throwing it away is easier than whatever the alternative is, which is presumably setting it down, a skill most humans acquire by age four and which appears to have eluded him. Staff at his properties have described finding silverware in trash cans, on floors, in locations that suggest the concept of a surface designed to receive an object has not fully registered with the man responsible for the nuclear codes.
This is, in a vacuum, a minor eccentricity. In the context of the full inventory, it is load-bearing.
The flatulence is documented. Multiple sources from multiple properties across multiple administrations have described the president as a man of significant and unapologetic gaseous output, delivered in meetings, in motorcades, in the presence of heads of state and cabinet secretaries and at least one foreign dignitary who had flown across an ocean specifically to be in the room. He does not acknowledge it. He does not excuse himself. He produces it and continues speaking, with the specific confidence of a man who has decided that the normal social contract around bodily functions does not apply to him, which is, to be fair, consistent with his position on every other social contract.
The smell. Multiple accounts, sourced from people who have been in close proximity to him across different decades and contexts, describe a man whose personal scent is best characterized as a combination of fast food, self-tanner, and the specific olfactory signature of a person who has decided that their relationship with hygiene is their own business and nobody else’s, which would be an entirely defensible position if the person in question were not asking to be the face of the nation at state dinners and international summits and the occasional G7 where the other leaders have, as a group, showered.
The food. The McDonald’s, the KFC, the Diet Coke, the well-done steak with ketchup, the two scoops of ice cream when everyone else gets one, the chocolate cake he described in such loving detail during an interview about a missile strike that the interviewer had to redirect him back to the geopolitical event he had authorized. He eats the way a child eats when the adults have left the room, with the specific purposefulness of someone who has found the things that feel good and has decided that feeling good is the entire purpose of eating and that anyone who suggests vegetables are involved in a complete diet is, probably, a globalist.
The makeup. The foundation is applied in a shade that does not match his hands, his neck, or any color that occurs in the human complexion spectrum without industrial intervention, resulting in a visual effect best described as a tangerine that has achieved sentience and decided to run for office. The white circles around the eyes, left unmade in what appears to be an homage to the raccoon aesthetic, suggest that the application process involves goggles or swimming glasses or possibly just the specific avoidance of any surface where the mirror might show him what the rest of us are seeing. He has been doing this for decades. Nobody has told him. Or they have told him and he has responded in the way he responds to all information that he has not requested, which is to not receive it.
The hair. The subject of the hair is almost too well-documented to include and yet its omission would be a failure of completeness. The construction, which appears to involve the cooperation of several distinct regions of his scalp in a feat of follicular engineering that defies the normal laws of gravity, wind resistance, and good judgment, has been photographed from angles that reveal the underlying architecture with a clarity that no publicist has managed to suppress. It is, in its way, a monument to the same instinct that gold-plates everything: the belief that more is more, that coverage is the solution to absence, that a thing which is not there can be made to appear there through sufficient effort and product and the cooperation of an atmosphere that is, on most days, willing to play along.
The redecorating. He arrived at the White House and immediately set about improving it in the way he improves everything, which is to say he applied gold to it. Not subtly. Not as an accent. Gold curtains. Gold fixtures. Gold-plated everything that would accept gold plating and some things that would not but received it anyway. The Oval Office, which has hosted Churchill and Mandela and the Apollo astronauts, was fitted with the aesthetic sensibility of a casino in a tax haven, the specific design philosophy that says a thing is not valuable unless it announces its value loudly enough to be heard from the parking lot. Jackie Kennedy restored the White House with museum-quality historical pieces. Melania removed the trees. Donald added gold. This is the trajectory of the institution’s aesthetic since 2017, and the endpoint is a room that looks like what would happen if a Marriott lobby and a Vegas high-roller suite had a child that was then left unsupervised near a catalog of decorative hardware.
The trash. Accounts from staff at Mar-a-Lago and the White House describe a man who leaves things where he is done with them, which is not always where they were designed to go, because designing things to go somewhere implies a plan for after the moment and planning for after the moment is not a skill the inventory supports. Napkins, wrappers, documents, plates, the occasional classified briefing: the surfaces around him at the end of an event are a record of his presence in the way a campsite is a record of a bear’s.
The names. He has called people human scum, lowlifes, losers, slobs, pigs, dogs, rats, snakes, sleazebags, dumb as rocks, mentally deranged, crazy, wacky, slimeballs, and creeps, in tweets and at rallies and in official White House statements and in press conferences and once, memorably, in a prepared speech from the Oval Office. He has done this to private citizens, to journalists, to opposing politicians, to members of his own party, to foreign leaders, to the families of soldiers, to judges presiding over his cases, to a Gold Star family, and to the woman a jury found he had sexually abused, whom he continued calling a liar after the verdict, which added defamation to the invoice and cost him an additional $83 million, which he called a hoax. He is the most libelous public figure in the recorded history of American public life and he has never paid the social cost of it because the social cost requires a room willing to enforce it and the room has not been willing.
He takes things. The classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The silverware. The credit. The women, by his own recorded account. The cookies from the jar because the jar was there and he was there and wanting a thing has always been, for him, the same as the right to have it, and nobody was watching, and even when they were watching they decided not to say stop, and that decision, repeated across seventy years by parents and teachers and partners and executives and voters and the entire apparatus of the republic, is why we are here, in a gold-plated Oval Office that smells faintly of self-tanner and fast food, trying to locate the silverware.
It is in the trash.
It is always in the trash.
Read more: https://tomwellborn.substack.com/s/trump-and-other-phenomena
Wow. This is it in a gold leaf nutshell. MAGA’s president. A craven trash heap of a “man.” Brilliant piece, Tom.
Does anyone actually believe that he's physically capable of even dressing himself anymore? Much less, doing the make-up and hair sculpting, tying his own shoes or necktie? I don't. The last time he had to pick up after himself was likely when he was sent to his academy school.