Trump's gray hair, the first sign of defeat
And so we are gray. Like an elderly lady who suddenly decided not to dye her hats anymore, Donald Trump shows up at the meeting with the White House reporters wearing a gray carryover instead of the color we were used to, defined by everyone. canary yellow; in reality it is, or was, an indefinable color: between blond and yellow, closer to Naples yellow than acid yellow.
As we know, hair cutting in women is often an act linked to some change in emotional or sentimental state, to a mutation; so the decision to stop the dark color of the hair, and switch to gray tout court, is often an acknowledgment of one's age and status.
In Trump, despite all the machismo he unleashes, there is something feminine, in the same way that there is, or rather there was, in Silvio Berlusconi. Is the electoral defeat the cause of this gray? Or it is just a momentary forgetfulness waiting to undergo the hairdresser's treatment and return to the usual yellowish tint. In the next few days, or weeks, we will know. Certainly in a man who is so attentive to his physical appearance, this detail has its weight: it works as a symptom of something else. After all, his voice in this monologue press conference was not the thunderous and strong one it always had, weaker and at times even querulous.
Gray, say color scholars, is not exactly a color, in fact it indicates the greater or lesser brightness of a tint; is the scale between white and black. It is located between the two poles and participates in both. According to Michel Pastoureau, gray is well positioned in the ranking of the most popular colors; ranks in front of purple, orange and brown, which are the least preferred of all according to market surveys. He, the most famous color scholar in the world today, considers it his favorite, and cannot understand why it is not the same for others.
The reason for his predilection lies in the ability that gray possesses to create wider and more subtle plays of light and chiaroscuro: it is the color that makes the other colors "speak" with more precision and volubility.
For men who keep their hair for life, gray is a sign of wisdom and experience. It is customary to say: "I have not got gray hair at all", to indicate one's knowledge of men and things. Could this be the message Trump wants to convey with his new natural hair color? He wants to wink at his voters who seem to be of an advanced age: retirees and retirees of America?
Since we are in the USA, a variegated and complex country, as shown by the elections that see him ultimately defeated, there is a film with a high degree of symbolic representation of that cinematography in which gray takes on an important meaning: The Wizard of Oz. Released in cinemas in 1939, ten years after the great crisis of 1929, it divides Dorothy's story in two, between a sepia gray world and a color one.
In the same book by L. Frank Baum, from which it is taken, Kansas, the state of the little girl, is described as "a great gray prairie", and so is the house in which Dorothy lives, while the cyclone that drags her away deposits her. “Beyond the rainbow”, over the rainbow, where her shoes are red and the streets are built with yellow bricks.
Did Donald Trump fail to arrive in Dorothy's Emerald City dragged by the cyclone of her millions of votes? Are the gray hats of the press conference therefore what remains after the electoral defeat? "Gray is the color of dust and frustration," wrote David Scott Kastan in a book by him, and this is what the president still in office looks like with his tuft falling on his forehead as usual, hiding an advancing baldness.
Dragged from the altars to the dust, he undoubtedly entered the "gray zone", to put it in an expression made famous by Primo Levi, with which the writer indicated the vast area between the victims and the executioners in the concentration camp. Gray is a little white and a little black, and is the color of millions of people around the world. Becoming old, in the end, is still a natural thing.
