Why the Suit? Why the Hair?

 

My daughter asks yesterday, “Why is Trump always wearing a suit?”

Because he understands branding. He is in character.

Trump the brandable character wears a distinctive costume, just as Santa Claus might, or Spiderman. This is memorable, and marketable. You can and people will pay now to put the name “Trump” on their hotel. Just as Santa sells snow globes, and Spiderman sells action figures.

The Trump costume is a blue business suit, usually a red tie, an orange complexion, and an improbable blonde combover. Paint those features on an Easter egg, or a stick man, and anyone will recognize  Trump.

Trump does not need the combover to hide baldness, as he demonstrated once to Jimmy Fallon. It is a costume, a put-on. He certainly does not need to paint his face orange.

It is, specifically, the costume of a clown: the face paint, the shocking hair. It is deliberately comic and absurd.

Taking on the character of a clown, a parody of the rich capitalist, allows Trump to speak as bluntly as he does: by common consent, clowns and jesters are permitted to speak truths that others cannot. This on the flimsy pretext that they are crazy or stupid, and so need not—in a phrase—be taken seriously. It gives those who need to pigeonhole a pigeonhole. This gives Trump his celebrated Teflon coating, of which he is well aware.

And Trump is a brilliant comedian. His rallies go on for hours, extempore, and people throng to them.

This also explains why he is hated.

Narcissists do not get humour. You might have noticed. Humour is offensive to them. Everything is life and death to them, and whatever you said is “not funny.” Or, in Biden’s favourite phrase, “not a joke.”

To them, a clown is simply a loose cannon, liable to spill the beans on them at any moment.

Narcissists are always aware, at some level, that they are living a lie and manipulating people. They are proud of it. They accordingly fear anything beyond their control, anything unpredictable. Like humour, which always depends on a reversal of expectations. 

Those who live with a narcissist know the experience of “walking on eggshells.” Conversation must keep to a narrow band of acceptable discourse or they become agitated; this is the essence and origin of the current “cancel culture.”

The very life of a narcissist tends to narrow down to familiar routine. They dislike moving. They dislike changing jobs. They fear anything unfamiliar: unfamiliar foods, unfamiliar music, new ideas, unfamiliar routines. They have a hard time breaking habits, and are prone to addictions. 

This narcissistic tendency produces the phenomenon, increasingly remarked upon, of the “NPC”—people who seem robotic and predictable in all their opinions and responses, as if programmed by computer. 

Trump, the loose cannon, the clown, is the opposite of that. His views have never been orthodox for a conservative. They are unpredictable issue by issue.

That is why they fear him.

And why to the rest of us, listening to him feels liberating.