A smoking-gun Trump tape may have dropped last week.
Around Feb. 5, viral video circulated of Trump’s hair blowing forward as he ascended the stairs to Air Force One. It appeared to drift off the back of his head in one piece, which was the subject of much Twitter amusement as rumors resurfaced that the president had had his scalp … resurfaced.
Until now, they’ve been nothing but rumors, bolstered by a claim from ex-wife Ivanka that Trump had scalp-reduction surgery in 1989.
But the eagle-eyed spotted a clue in the video: Trump appears to have a vertical incision down the middle of his back scalp, which would lend credence to the scalp-reduction truthers. In the procedure, sections of the scalp are cut out and others pulled forward to minimize a bald spot. The Daily Beast asked plastic surgeons about the telltale marks and got different opinions about Trump’s hair history.
Dr. Lisa Ishii, an otolaryngology professor at Johns Hopkins who specializes in hair transplantation, says the surgery is difficult — “Scalp skin is very stiff skin. It’s very hard to pull together the skin edges and get them to close to each other if you cut out anything beyond a half dollar size piece of skin” — and that she doesn’t believe Trump had it done: “I doubt that’s the route… it’s possible that he had a hair transplant.”
Hair transplantation became the hair-loss surgery standard in the ’90s. During that procedure, follicles are removed from the lower back of the scalp, where hair is stalwart even in people prone to baldness, and replanted in spare areas.
But Dr. Samuel Lam, owner of the Lam Institute for Hair Restoration, says it’s likely that Trump did submit to a scalp reduction surgery: “If you see a vertical incision on the back of the scalp on the crown, that’s very typical of a scalp reduction,” he told the Daily Beast. “Most likely, he had it.”
For what it’s worth, in the recent book “Fire & Fury,” author Michael Wolff revealed first daughter Ivanka Trump’s take on her father’s coif: “She often described the mechanics behind it to friends,” wrote Wolff. “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” — a grooming product he’ll no doubt be in the market to replace.
