James' World 2

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Befitting his home in the Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. practices the politics of narcissism: If I embrace it, it must be right. If I embody it, you should emulate it.

I flaunt a sun-sizzled appearance, so you should have the same leathery license.

About two months ago, the health secretary nixed a proposal by the Food and Drug Administration to make tanning beds, like alcohol and cigarettes, off-limits to minors. That development didn’t get extensive news media attention. It couldn’t compete with all the salvos being exchanged — between the United States and Iran, between President Trump and the pope — and it arguably had marginal significance: The proposal had been on the books, unimplemented, for more than a decade. Kennedy wasn’t changing a policy. He was killing a possibility.

But why this one? Why bother? Is there some melanoma lobby we don’t know about? Needn’t he conserve his energy for his shirtless workouts and his mindless conspiracy theories?

He cited the importance of personal choice and the burden that tanning regulations would place on small businesses, but I think his attention to the matter reflected a particular obsession among Trump and his attendants. They’re fixated on looks — to a degree that’s not remotely normal, in a manner that’s positively cartoonish, with no appreciation for how much of themselves and their vacuous governing philosophy they’re revealing.

Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised.

Appearances simultaneously obscure reality and substitute for it. Your sheen is your success, and you are what you impersonate. Trump has long been known to judge potential cabinet secretaries and military leaders on whether they look the part, and that thinking factored into his embrace of Kevin Warsh, who was just confirmed by the Senate to be the new chair of the Federal Reserve.

Sure, Warsh has an impressive résumé, and he has signaled obeisance to a president who demands such submission. But he has an additional asset. “On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’” Trump wrote in the late January social media post that announced Warsh’s selection. According to an article by Eva Roytburg in Fortune magazine at that time, Trump once told Warsh, during a 2019 meeting in the White House, “You’re a really handsome guy.”

To Trump, that’s an important credential. All the world’s a television show, “central casting” is a recurring compliment and handsomeness or beauty establishes a kind of superiority, which in turn bequeaths confidence, which then begets dominance. By his zoology, an aviary of peacocks equals a menagerie of lions.

And what peacocks these putzes are. In many other milieus, Kristi Noem’s comically voluminous tresses, suspiciously plump visage, and unsubtle makeup would be a waste of aggressive cosmetology. In Trump’s circle, they established her as a fierce warrior goddess — Wonder Woman minus the golden lasso — and got her the title of homeland security secretary for 13 sadistic months.

In many other milieus, Pete Hegseth’s habit of sharing videos of his workouts would be seen as a grossly self-enamored distraction. In Trump’s circle, they’re a testament to his tenacity. The defense secretary posted one such ode to his own musculature shortly before the beginning of the war with Iran, as U.S. warships headed toward that region; it showed him doing a bench press as the soldiers whom he’d gathered around him cheered, his wife applauded, and, I guess, the ayatollahs quivered. Nothing spells imminent doom like a cabinet member’s pecs.

Kennedy has painstakingly sculpted and burnished his own physique — through gym workouts, testosterone therapy, tanning. He has the same retrograde take on masculinity and male primping that Hegseth does, along with the same moth-to-flame fascination with social media, where he can be found pumping iron in jeans, ditching his shirt, soaking in a hot tub. Kid Rock joined him for cardio and calisthenics in a sauna. Hegseth joined him for — and beat him in — a race to finish 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups.

Is this supposed to pass for inspiration? It’s merely proof of perspiration. But it seems to raise rather than lower these exhibitionists’ standing with the president. Trump treats physical vanity as a secret handshake, a sign that you get his egotistic ethos and you belong. If you’re not strutting, you’re not selling.

Pitch and packaging are everything. Perfect them, and you don’t have to worry about the product itself. That thinking informs the cabinet secretaries’ physical preening just as it explains the president’s oratorical preening — all those ludicrous superlatives — and his emphasis on costumes, scenery, and slogans.

Remember those colorful charts in front of that gigantic American flag in the White House Rose Garden for the announcement of mathematically nonsensical tariffs that would come and go, increase and decrease, and ultimately be deemed illegal? Liberation Day was the semantic lipstick on that pig.

The war with Iran is Operation Epic Fury, and it has demonstrated anew that the Trump administration’s initiatives are lavishly marketed rather than carefully conceived. Assessments of the war’s progress change daily, even hourly, and repeatedly turn out to be unreliable, because they’re often just phrases put through the language equivalent of tanning beds to be given a glow and bronzed just so. That’s what’s important. Not the cancer growing beneath.

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Ben Wiseman

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