Family Faces

It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the hair, that complicated weave that has the look of a blanched, rotting bird’s nest.

But take your eyes from it and dwell on the face below. In fact, dwell on the faces of the entire Trump clan, minor league Shakespearean in its shallow depths.

His face is puffy, squinty, leading down to a neck that is starting to spread over his shirt collars. The skin is unhealthy, like the so-called pebbled pigskin of a football. Each blessed Diet Coke adds to the unhealthy pallor . My computer keeps telling me how horrible for the system is just one can of this iconic soft drink, so what can I say except, “Drink up, motherfucker!”

Make no mistake, this is the face of evil – unthinking, instinctive, deep, and abiding evil.  It has been nourished over the decades by an ever more irresponsible media and the adulation of a large portion of the American population whose attenuated attention span, like his, has been infected by the disease of his celebrity.

The baseball hat covers the hair and there is just the face, that self-satisfied, gloating, pig face, hateful in its supreme arrogance. Fear it.

The First Courtesan, Melania, has the careful face of a shrewd Balkan peasant, inscrutable, with her own squint, looking out on these American rubes who have crowned her husband with the world-weary eyes of jaded faux nobility. She is a copper-plated trophy, already greening.

And the sons, ah, the sons, simper-faced and endlessly entitled, killers of dumb animals, and little better than that themselves. Their  shifty faces mask a rote obeisance to whatever comes out of the mouth of their petulant father. They are echoes of echoes, family men both, breeding darkness and ignorance down the generations, although there is always hope for the family future.

Then, of course, the smooth, unruffled faces of Ivanka and Jared, living Dorian Gray portraits. They are inscrutable in their inbred pursuit of their own endless ends and needs. Ivanka is truly frightening in the self-assurance with which she markets herself and her shabby empire. She would make a locomotive take a dirt road. Jared’s is the ultimate poker face, handsome and bland, all humanity hidden by an unblinking silence even when he is speaking. Yet there is weakness there, faint now, but to be tested by coming events.

And there’s little Tiffany, party girl in law school, a mass of hair extensions and bright-eyed stupidity. She is the closet Trump, kept out of sight and mind lest she turn out to be more stupid-mouthed than her oldest brother. She was named after a jewelry store client of her father’s, her name an ongoing legacy of his pimping.

Barron? Leave the kid alone. He has enough problems being in that family. He has a nice face, too. For now.