Donald Trump’s Superficiality Is Bone Deep
· The Atlantic
Donald Trump is reluctant to anoint J. D. Vance as his successor, and understandably so. But The New York Times recently discovered a peculiar basis for the president’s concern. “Mr. Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Mr. Vance might not look the part,” the paper reported. “He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Mr. Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the White House South Lawn.”
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Of all the reasons for Trump to hesitate to crown Vance as the Republican presidential nominee in 2028, he has fixated not on Vance’s inflammatory comments about single women or on the difficulty vice presidents have detaching themselves from their administration’s unpopular record, but instead on the one time that Vance briefly mishandled a football trophy.
This is an extraordinarily shallow method for picking your party’s standard-bearer. It isn’t a surprise, however, because Trump is almost certainly the shallowest man ever to inhabit his office. Superficiality is a value system that has guided some of his administration’s most important decisions as it has drifted from menace into frivolity and decadence.
Trump has devoted his second term to the aspects of the presidency that would appeal to an apolitical tourist who visits Washington, D.C. He has poured himself into redecorations of the White House, interior and exterior, and has updated the city’s public spaces. This attention to renovation has yielded some undeniably lovely results, such as restored fountains and plazas. Other changes are more, well, taste-based, such as replacing the White House Rose Garden with a patio, and giving the Oval Office hotel-style signage and filling it with expensive knickknacks and gold leaf.
[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]
What’s striking about this campaign is not its aesthetic but its obsessive quality. Other presidents have engaged in monument-building and public-space remodeling, but Trump musters far more passion for these endeavors than any of his predecessors did. After a gunman invaded the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Trump tried to exploit the groundswell of sympathy, not to advance some high-value policy, or to seize more power, but to renew his push for Congress to fund his cherished ballroom project.
Trump has applied the same priorities to his personnel selections. His favorite way to compliment any official is to say that they come out of “central casting,” which is to say that he judges them by whether they look like they can do the job rather than whether they, you know, actually can.
He lingers on the appearance of men in his orbit—witness his recent wistful description of the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, a “beautiful guy” with “legs like tree trunks”—which my colleague Ashley Parker has shrewdly observed contributes to Trump’s curiously gay-adjascent sensibility. This behavior codes as gay mainly because it is unusual for straight men to spend so much time praising the beauty of other men. But it is also unusual for anyone, outside of beauty-related fields, to place as much emphasis on looks as Trump does.
Trump’s concern for appearance seeps into many policy domains. He has undertaken a whole-of-government assault on wind energy apparently because he hates the way wind turbines look. He has called wind farms “unsightly,” complained at length that they ruined the view of his golf course in Scotland, and said things such as “I don’t want windmills destroying our place. I don’t want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell.” He has accordingly shut down approved wind projects, forcing consumers to pay higher energy prices.
His hatred of immigration is likewise visceral. He associates immigrants from the global South with ugliness and mess (“filthy, dirty, disgusting”). This impulse is certainly tinged with racism, just as his disproportionate emphasis on female appearance (good looks being a bonus for male Trumpers and more of a requirement for female ones) has a sexist origin. Racism and sexism come in a variety of flavors, and Trump’s versions are inflected with an appearance bias.
His alliance with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement primarily reflects a rejection of science and expertise. But Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also share a skin-deep understanding of health, as do many of RFK Jr.’s allies. They seem to genuinely believe that allowing measles and other infectious diseases to spread while the shirt-optional secretary of health and human services engages in feats of strength on camera constitutes a net positive for public health.
No policy field has been affected more thoroughly by Trump’s superficiality than defense. He has placed in charge of the military Pete Hegseth, a figure he plucked from Fox News. Hegseth not only embodies Trump’s preference for “central casting”; he has turned it into a departmental ethos. The defense secretary has implemented new grooming standards and showed off his fitness with a series of televised workouts with the rank and file. Early in the Iran war, the president’s daily briefing featured curated videos of “stuff blowing up,” which fed his apparent belief that the campaign was a smashing success.
Trump has developed a fascination with building a new line of “Trump-class” battleships. Military experts have disparaged the functionality and cost of the expensive vessels. Mark Montgomery, a former rear admiral who works for the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, complained to The Wall Street Journal that the Navy is “focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”
Trump hardly disputes the accusation. It is more of a boast. “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a really aesthetic person,” he said once. “I put a little more spirit in the hull,” Trump told troops at another point. “I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.” He has nostalgically invoked the old World War II documentary Victory at Sea.
This is happening at a moment when military tactics are transforming: The World War II–era crafts that hold nostalgic appeal for the Boomer president have diminishing value, and fleets of cheap drones have grown far more potent. As the military analyst Phillips O’Brien explained to my colleague David Frum, the most valuable warrior on the battlefield is usually a drone operator, who is essentially (and sometimes literally) a video-game player. That the U.S. military is losing the first war of the drone era while the television-trained defense secretary focuses on facial hair and push-ups is probably not a coincidence.
Future historians looking for a set piece to embody the Trump era might linger on the forthcoming UFC cage fight at the White House. The scene is intended to convey Trump’s sense of spectacle and violent domination, the link between power and literal muscle that fascinates him. The administration reportedly plans to fill the stands with soldiers—but not just any soldiers. CNN reports that attendees must meet fitness standards and generally “look good.” They are, after all, casting a show.
It is almost too on the nose for the aging president to stage gladiatorial bouts and commission victory arches as his armies overextend their power in a futile effort to subdue the Persians. The irony almost surely escapes him. His mind cannot process winning as anything deeper than looking good. The United States may be surrendering its technological advantages to China and allowing its scientific, medical, and bureaucratic skill to decay. But just as Trump slathers makeup on his skin and proclaims himself the healthiest president who ever lived, he measures the country’s success in gold leaf.