President Donald Trump sported his second—or third—hair transformation in three days during a roundtable at the State Department on Friday afternoon.
Just as his trademark style appeared to have gone back to its normal wispy coif after an inexplicable volume boost on Wednesday, the 80-year-old president again seemed to have gained a much fluffier, fuller head of hair as he gave remarks on the mining industry.
“IT’S A MIRACLE! Trump has a full head of hair again today,” independent journalist Aaron Rupar quipped on X.
Others joked that it must have “grown back.”
Trump’s Aug. 5 appearance in Las Vegas, where he delivered a speech touting his own economic accomplishments, set off a firestorm of memes Wednesday over his dramatically altered hairdo and speculation about whether he was wearing a wig.
But by the next day, his hair strangely appeared to revert to normal, suggesting that Hairgate may have only been a temporary follicular glitch.
Not so, however. It was back to its unusually voluminous form on Friday, with a seemingly darker tint.
According to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, Trump is simply using elaborate styling tricks to cover up a bald spot.
“I can tell you what’s... under Donald Trump’s hair,” Wolff said this week on the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head Podcast. “Nothing,” he said.
Pointing to his own bald head, Wolff added, “That’s actually what the top of Donald Trump’s head is like.”
Wolff wrote in 2018’s Fire and Fury that Ivanka Trump “often described the mechanics behind [her father’s head] to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”
In 2021, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham wrote in her book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now, that Trump sometimes cut his hair with “a huge pair of scissors that could probably cut a ribbon at an opening of one of his properties.”
Former adult film star Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had an affair in the mid-2000s, wrote in her 2018 memoir, Full Disclosure, that she teased him about his hair.
“I know. It’s ridiculous,” Trump reportedly told Daniels. Yet he said he had to keep the style because it had become his “trademark.”
“Everybody talks about it,” he said. “It’s my thing.”
So when TIME magazine put Trump on its cover last October, he naturally took offense at how his hair looked.
“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,” he wrote on social media.
In medical reports written before Trump took office last January, an anti-balding drug called finasteride, sold under the brand name Propecia, was listed among his prescriptions. But it hasn’t shown up in any medical records since then.
After a June report, the White House said it “reflects all medications deemed clinically relevant to disclose at this time,” adding: “No additional undisclosed conditions or procedures materially affecting his health status were omitted from this report.”
