Donald Trump has opened up about his anxiety regarding his thin hair.
In an unusually candid onstage moment, the 80-year-old president complained about a balding patch around his crown. “I gotta do a little bit better in the back right there,” he said as he looked up at a large screen at the Republican National Committee midterm convention in Dallas on Thursday.
“I don’t like that little skin that’s showing, I’m not happy with it,” he added, to laughs from the crowd. “That’s not good. I shouldn’t have looked up there.”
The mild freakout comes as Trump’s hair has been in the national focus. Last Wednesday, the president randomly denied that he wears a wig.
Speaking at a Rose Garden event, he told a story to support his claim. He recalled a speech at a campaign rally in 2024 in support of Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, where he said he jostled with “the worst weather I think I’ve ever experienced outside of maybe a hurricane we had in Florida one time.”
“I went up to the speaker, and it was blowing so hard,” he said. “You know, for years, I had to suffer with people saying, ‘He wears a wig.’”
“I don’t wear a wig. But that night, they found out I did not wear a wig because if you did, it was not going to be on your head very long,” continued Trump, whose hair has been visibly thinning.
In the days after this story, he debuted a new hairstyle. The president shocked the country when he touched down at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, New Jersey, to spend the weekend at his golf course in Bedminster last week.
He arrived on the tarmac with a tousled head of brown hair, and his familiar side parting was suddenly flipped to the opposite side.
Longtime Trump biographer Michael Wolff claimed on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast on Saturday that a portable kit to fix Trump’s hair—complete with patches of different colors to match any given hue—follows him around the country.
Wolff said Trump has patches applied with “some kind of paste.”
“He has somebody who’s following, and there have been a couple of people over—certainly over the political years—who’ve carried the patch kit,” Wolff said. “They are next to the people who carry the nuclear codes.”
Wolff added, “He has what are called patches, and they call it the patch kit. And the patch kit is a little, you know, small tufts of hair that match whatever color his hair might be at the time. And those are applied if needed and necessary—so the maintenance of this hair is a major enterprise and has been for many years.”
