Trump: It’s Not About the Tie. It’s All About the Tie.
A 74-year-old man emerges slowly from a helicopter and ambles to a waiting car. It is after 1 in the morning. His posture is hunched, his gait halting. In his hand, he holds a scrunched-up baseball cap. He wears a suit and white shirt, the stains from his bronzer visible on his unbuttoned collar. His long red tie dangles lifelessly from his neck.
He looks tired, bone-weary. It has been a long, frustrating day. Things didn’t go his way. This is just the start of what is sure to be an exhausting campaign season. Ok, so give the guy a break! Who among us would still have their tie knotted at this early hour? Certainly, his appearance is not unreasonable, right?
So why are we so jarred by Donald Trump’s appearance during his early morning departure from Marine One? The answer has less to do with his clothes themselves, but everything to do with the message he has been sending us with his clothes.
Through forty years in the public spotlight, heightened in the five years since he undertook his first presidential bid, Trump has rarely been photographed in anything but a suit and tie. His ties have become more sedate over the years — gone are the wide stripes and florals of the 70s and the whimsical prints of the 80s — but the basic uniform remains. He has recently pared this image down to its most basic elements: dark suit (black or navy), white shirt (always), shiny silk tie (preferably Republican red, but sometimes “Democrat” blue or jaunty yellow, and occasionally with color-blocked, diagonal stripes). If it is cold, a dark wool overcoat, sometimes a presidential windbreaker if he’s in transit. For very formal occasions, he’ll don black or white tie (though not always successfully), as the event requires. He doesn’t wear a tie when he’s feeling sporty but has rigid uniforms for both golf (tan chinos, white polo, red cap) and tennis (white shorts, white polo, red cap). Outside of his weekend leisure activities, I was able to find just a few images of him without a tie, though each instance represents a riff on established tropes. Even when others go tie-less, Trump stays in his sartorial lane.
Is this really important, you may ask? Remember that time Barack Obama wore a tan suit? Not wearing a tie doesn’t make one unpresidential! And lots of people mix it up: witness Jim Jordan’s jacket and Matt Gaetz’s shoes. People should feel free to express themselves through their clothing.
That is just the point. Clothes are the story we tell about ourselves. The psychologist Dan McAdams’s work on narrative identity — the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves — highlights the importance of storytelling to our ability to make sense of ourselves and our place in the world. For many of us, and for almost all public figures, clothing is a more intentional, outward manifestation of that narrative identity: it is the version of ourselves we want the world to see, a heuristic or shortcut we employ to guide others as they make sense of us and our place in the world.
Trump knows this perhaps better than anybody (certainly better than his current wife and eldest daughter, about whose many fashion-storytelling missteps I have thoughts). The message he projects is clear and simple: I am wealthy and, by extension, powerful. This is what expensive clothes look like. Never mind the ill-fitting suits, the over-long ties and waistcoats, they may not even register to many in Trump’s base, few of whom wear suits regularly (along with the rest of the country). Trump’s look may transcend time and fashion trends, for better or for worse, but it certainly costs a lot. If you don’t notice it is expensive, he’ll be sure to tell you before long! Note the explanation he gave at his Tulsa rally for his seeming inability to drink from a glass of water at West Point:
“[Melania] said, “Well, I know what you did, you had on a very good red tie that’s sort of expensive.” It’s silk because they look better, they have a better sheen to ’em. And I don’t want to get water on the tie, and I don’t want to drink much, so I lifted up the water. I see we have a little glass of water, where the hell did this water come from, right? Where did it come from? And I looked down at my tie, ’cause I’ve done it, I’ve taken water, and it spills down into your tie, it doesn’t look good for a long time. And frankly, the tie is never the same.”
That’s right, Trump believes his tie is more valuable than your opinion of him. He just admitted that he cares more about the former than the latter.
Which brings us back to the walk of shame. The image is jarring not because we’ve never seen a powerful man loosen his tie before nor tired folks shuffle off of red-eye flights. Rather, this image of Trump as rumpled is so inconsistent with the image of himself he has carefully and intentionally constructed.
Perhaps more importantly for Trump and his reelection prospects, this image appears utterly inauthentic. Organizational scholars Glenn Carroll and Dennis Wheaton differentiate between two kinds of authenticity: type authenticity, how true something is to the category to which it belongs; and moral authenticity, how true something is to its own projected self, its sincerity. Trump’s late-night shuffle off of Marine One displays type authenticity, the image is consistent with a tired politician getting off a flight after a draining speech. It does not display moral authenticity, however: it is inconsistent with the stories Trump tells about himself.
This is consequential because Trump’s persona rests on his moral authenticity. How many times have we heard his surrogates say some variation of “that’s just Trump being Trump”? His supporters in the 2016 election loved his outsider image, his unwillingness to play the political game, his complete antipathy toward the conventions of presidential politics. Type authenticity has never been their concern — they love Trump because he does not pretend to be presidential. The core of their support rests squarely on Trump’s moral authenticity, being true the self he projects in public.
And were Trump being himself, he would never allow photographers to catch him in this moment of dishabille.
That he waved to photographers in this state is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this whole interlude. Nobody is rushing Trump off of Marine One; the cleaning crew will wait for the president. He doesn’t have another flight to catch. Sure, he wants his bed, but the Trump of 2015 or even 2019 would have taken a few moments to check himself in the mirror, reknot his tie, and pull himself together before facing the paps.
I can only interpret the fact that he did not as evidence that he is tired of this ride and ready to get off. If he stops believing his own narrative identity, he will not be able to project it as confidently and consistently as he has over the past 5 years. The inauthenticity that will unmask — the gulf between what he says he is and what he reveals himself to be — may be too much of a let-down for voters who loved the version of himself he sold them. If Trump cannot fulfill their iconoclastic fantasies, if he is just a tired old man stumbling down a ramp or the helicopter steps or whatever, what purpose does he serve?
For that reason, I posit that his tie is not simply undone. It may just be his undoing.
