Combover Mechanics

My favorite excerpt from Fire and Fury was about Donald Trump's combover. I find it hard to listen to him sometimes because I stare at it, and try to figure out exactly how he does it. His daughter spilled the beans in the book...

Ivanka maintained a relationship with her father that was in no way conventional. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. For Ivanka, it was all business — building the Trump brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others. She often described the mechanics behind it 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. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.

It turns out that David Stern got it almost exactly right in his spiritual classic, "The Balding Handbook: Five Stages of Grieving for Your Hair Loss". In Part 1 (Denial), Chapter 2 (Combovers), he names the various different types of combovers. "The Flip" (sported at the time by Rudy Guiliani), "The Frontal Tuft Fluff Up" (sported at the time by Al Gore), "The Taliban or Soft Serve Swirl" (sported at the time by former Illinois basketball coach Lou Henson), and "The Trump" (sported at the time by someone he never imagined would become president). This is how Stern describes "The Trump"...

The Trump is probably the most recent combover innovation. Trumpers grow their hair really long in the back and sides, flip it toward the front, and keep it in place with ozone-layer-killing-industrial-strength hairspray. There's no need to see the certificate of the bozo who "birthed" this movement, but suffice it to say that baldologists everywhere get a certain glee when they tell their clients combovers--"You're Fired!"