Somewhere between the scrolling headlines and the cable news echo chamber, the people held their collective breath—not for justice, not for peace, not even for the latest interest rate hike—but to find out if Donald J. Trump would finally, at long last, let his scalp go free.
The poll appeared without warning, nestled between reposted memes of golden eagles and doctored Civil War paintings:
“Should I just go bald? Yes / No / Only if I get indicted again.”
No one could say for certain whether it was a joke, a cry for help, or an attempt to distract from the pending trial(s), the looming economic crash, or the rapidly uninsurable Florida coastline. But it didn’t matter. Within minutes, pundits debated follicular strategy on national television. Morning shows consulted dermatologists. And somewhere in a think tank, a policy intern wept softly into a draft climate report no one would ever read.
Across the country, phones buzzed. Alerts went out. Friends texted friends, “Have you seen this?” as if it were news. As if any of this mattered more than—well, everything else. But maybe it did. Maybe in the grand spectacle of decline, the question of Trump’s comb-over finally stood in for something bigger: a referendum not on hair, but on truth, shame, or the last vestiges of image control in a collapsing empire.
In Nevada County, a retired contractor in Lake Wildwood posted the poll on Nextdoor with the caption, “Finally some real leadership.” Meanwhile, over in Nevada City, a man calling himself “Solar Gideon” responded with a 19-part Instagram story arguing that baldness is a precondition for ascension and that Trump is being prepared for “the next vibrational plane.”
Even The Union couldn’t resist a write-up. A guest column titled Let Him Shine praised Trump’s boldness and called on other aging male leaders to “liberate themselves from the tyranny of the follicle.” The author described baldness as “a kind of transparency,” a phrase that would haunt the editorial staff until the next installment of Off the Record.
What’s stunning isn’t that Trump did this. It’s that we all followed. We always follow. The poll becomes the story, the story becomes the narrative, and the narrative becomes the news cycle. Not because it’s important, but because it’s there. Because it’s easier than facing the other stuff; the real stuff, the hard stuff, the kind of stuff that won’t trend, won’t sell ad space, and won’t make you laugh in the group chat.
Maybe it’s not distraction. Maybe it’s defense. A nation standing on the deck of a sinking ship, captivated not by the rising water but by the captain’s hairpiece fluttering in the wind. It’s not that we don’t know the storm is coming. We just prefer to argue about toupees while it hits.
And so, with bated breath and a growing sense of unease, we wait. Not for change, not for reckoning, but for the results of a poll, desperate to know if, this time, he’ll go bald and take the rest of us with him.
