A fter Donald Trump ’s disastrous debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September he decided to center his campaign on a single incendiary issue: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.
” When Trump was corrected during the debate by the ABC moderator David Muir, who pointed out that his statement about the Haitian community in the Ohio town was erroneous, he insisted it was factual. “Well,” he said, “I’ve seen people on television, people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’” But there were no such “people on television”.
There were no dogs taken for food. Trump called Muir a “foolish fool”, and said, “He’s a guy with good hair, but not as good as it was five years ago.” Trump showed up at the debate with a new hairstyle and tint – less Liberace and brassy blond, cut a bit shorter and softer, and shaped without the stiff angular pompadour – to lend him a more youthful appearance.
His hair is always a preoccupation that has in the past had priority over policy. On a visit to France, in 2018, he refused to attend a memorial service at the Aisne-Marne American cemetery of first world war soldiers near Paris in a light rain whose humidity might loosen the firm hold of his hairspray, and gave as an excuse that the fallen were “suckers” and “losers”. At the debate, he was anxiously competing with someone on the .