By Jonathan Chait
Wednesday, June 03, 2026
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.”
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.
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-adjacent
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.
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