Donald Trump’s signature hairdo is all about grabbing maximum attention, author Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast this week.
Wolff, author of a series of books about Trump in power, said the president viewed his hair as part of a wider strategy to stand out—including from Joe Biden on the 2024 campaign trail.
“He looks gray,” Wolff said of Biden. “He’s washed-out. You know, his hair is—what’s left of it—is gray. The skin is gray. The suits are gray.”
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“And Trump would point out, ‘Look at him,’” he continued. “‘Nobody even sees him. Everybody notices me.’ Which is absolutely true. And side by side, you know, who do you notice? You notice this guy, this appalling-looking guy who is Donald Trump, and not just the relatively normal old man-looking guy that Biden was.”
Wolff said Trump’s entire appearance is “by design.”
“He looks that way because he thinks that’s an effective way to look,” he added.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the biographer’s characterization.
Wolff also referenced a passage from Stormy Daniels’ book, where the porn star described a conversation she claims to have had with Trump about his locks during their alleged 2006 relationship. (Trump has denied any affair).
In Full Disclosure, Daniels wrote that she asked Trump about his hairdo, and he admitted it was “ridiculous.” Trump claimed that “every celebrity stylist” had offered to fix it, but he declined, according to the 2019 book.
“Everybody talks about it,” Trump said, per Daniels. “It’s my thing. It’s my trademark. Plus, if I let this person do it, it will just piss off all these other people. ‘Well, why did you let him do it?’ I know a lot of people who would kill to do it. The best. The best of the best.”
Daniels’ claims are backed up in part by an unexpected source: Seth Rogen. The actor, who appeared alongside her in Knocked Up (2007), says Daniels once told him about a bizarre exchange she claimed to have had with Trump about his hair.
In the 2024 documentary Stormy, Rogen recalls Daniels saying that Trump believed his “power” was tied to his hair, and that if he lost it, he’d lose his “power and his stature.”
“And that’s why, even though he knows it’s ridiculous and... objectively not passing all the checkmarks you would want a head of hair to pass, to him that is preferable than cutting it off because he has, like, superstitions about it,” Rogen said.
Wolff has been in Trump’s firing line after claiming on The Daily Beast Podcast last week that the president’s war on Harvard stems, at least in part, from a personal grudge over being rejected by the school.
“That story is totally FALSE, I never applied to Harvard,” Trump fumed on Truth Social Monday. “I graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He is upset because his book about me was a total ‘BOMB.’ Nobody wanted it, because his ‘reporting’ and reputation is so bad!”
Wolff’s most recent book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, also drew an angry outburst from the president at the time of its release in February. Trump called the book a “total FAKE JOB” and “obviously fictitious.”
