Zany Progressive: The piece by Seth Abramson provides details of Donald Trump’s malodorous offenses that none of us want to know about. Yet here you are, continuing to read. I don’t blame you! It’s hard to look away or plug your ears when this hot sh—I mean—goss’ is floating around!
It’s truly one of the more fascinating (and disgusting) essays I’ve read in some time, so if you need something to read on a work break, settle in for a wild ride!
Let’s Face it. People Dislike the Smell of Donald Trump.
Abramson provides a deep dive into the history of reports of Trump’s foul odor and includes account after account of Trump’s less-than-pleasant smells from folks who have worked with or encountered him in various capacities over the years. He also raises the “difficult question,” of whether it’s possible to “responsibly talk about the smell of politicians.”
In the case of Trump, the answer seems to be yes, since Trump himself is notorious for harshly judging how other people smell, and mistreating people who disgust him. Abramson also asks, “Does smell matter to voters as a matter of political science?” And then presents research showing that the answer is “a qualified yes.” He explains:
The “yes” here is a “qualified” one because it turns out that one political demographic in particular is likely to refuse to vote for any politician who smells bad.
That demographic is Donald Trump supporters.
As The New Scientist reported in 2018, data research reveals that “the more easily disgusted a person is, the more they are likely to support Donald Trump.” Not only do “people who are socially conservative seem to feel disgust more strongly” and “people who score[ ] higher for disgust [on digitally delivered tests] also tend[ ] to score more highly for right wing authoritarianism”, but Swedish researcher Jonas Olofsson found specifically that “Those that are most supportive of Donald Trump have the highest body odor disgust sensitivity.”
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He then surmises that it is perhaps for this reason that Trump has to work so hard to distance himself from the smell rumors. Again, Abramson explains:
This may be one of two reasons—the other being that Trump generally smells bad—that Trump does something astonishing for him when his scent is raised in public: refuses to engage at all.
If Olofsson’s research holds, there’s a great deal at stake for Trump in having his fans believe he smells good; in fact, given accounts of Trump smelling putrid dating back to the 1980s and 1990s, one wonders if Trump’s cologne releases in the 2000s and 2010s were in part intended to create a sense about him that he must, personally, smell nice—as what sort of person would peddle colognes when they themselves smell like (as so many are saying Donald Trump does) a dirty privy?
In the rest of the article, Abramson presents a “catalogue of potential scents” that might help explain Trump’s odor, which retired Republican congress person Adam Kinzinger described this way: “It’s not good. The best way to describe it… take armpits, ketchup, a butt and makeup and put that all in a blender and bottle that as a cologne.” Abramson lists the possible culprits, what he calls the “uncontested, objective signifiers that might help confirm Trump as a man who’d at a minimum have a distinct odor,” including bronzer, hair spray, hair coloring, diet, and drug abuse (specifically Adderall).
He ends the piece with a history of the “Trump Stinks” movement and some thoughtful analysis about why the issue of Trump stinking is fair game for the political arena (along with the important caveat that incontinence should *never* be stigmatized and ageism should *never* be tolerated):
The apparent fact that Donald Trump is chronically flatulent, incontinent, and just generally smelly in a way that’s deeply upsetting to all those around him—from friends to coworkers, foreign leaders to even some admirers—is now much more a part of everyday U.S. political debate than those on the political left would ever have imagined or wished.
But this isn’t even the hundredth or thousandth most surprising shift in U.S. political debate over the last decade, and nearly all of the worst ones on any such list we might imagine were gleefully authored by Donald Trump himself.
Incontinence as a medical condition should not have any stigma associated with it, full stop. Incontinence can be caused by age or by other factors well outside the control of a sufferer of incontinence. Indeed, it could reasonably be said that many of us will at some point experience incontinence as we age. But for political or personal or other self-aggrandizing reasons equating the question of whether a former POTUS smells awful to ageism is unacceptable.
Trump’s issues with odor appear to have begun many decades ago, when he was in his thirties, which means either (a) they stem from a serious medical condition he has since endeavored to lie ruthlessly to voters about, (b) they stem from dubious personal habits like drug abuse that American voters have a right to know of, or (c) they arise from personal hygiene issues of another sort that Trump himself opened the door to regular discussion of on the campaign trail by (i) regularly attacking the personal hygiene of political opponents, (ii) making ageism (not to mention disinformation related to age) the centerpiece of his two campaigns against Joe Biden, and (iii) making a decision—in the midst of pursuing a white supremacist political base—to put himself forward as an ideal specimen of “alpha-male” toughness, charisma, and sex appeal.
The New York Times reports that Trump has a “long fascination with genes and bloodlines”, and that this fascination has recently turned toward neo-Nazi themes—like publicly praising white Scandinavian Minnesotans for their “good genes” while positioning cities with large Black populations as dens of sloth, hopelessness, and depravity, or accusing nonwhite immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
If you want to read the whole stinking essay, here you go!
