Donald Trump’s only measure of a woman’s worth is whether or not he wants to have sex with her. For men, the president-elect has a more objective litmus test: facial hair.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that several Trump underlings thought John R. Bolton’s “brush-like mustache” disqualified him from the secretary of state shortlist.
“Donald was not going to like that mustache,” one anonymous source told the Post. “I can’t think of anyone that’s really close to Donald that has a beard that he likes.”
This is disturbing to anyone who wants our diplomatic force chosen by merit, not facefeel. But the American Mustache Institute, a very weird website and maybe-organization that advocates for mustachioed people, claims that Trump’s bias must be read in the context of a history of discrimination against Americans with lip hair.
“Neither of the major parties has even nominated a Mustached American candidate for President of the United States since Thomas E. Dewey challenged Harry S. Truman,” reads a statement posted to the site on Thursday. “Throughout much of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has preyed on a broad array of fears—vilifying Mexicans, poking fun at the handicapped, misogynistically castigating women and now—perhaps most unsettling—discriminating against people of Mustached American descent.” Authors cite a 1991 study that found people believed clean-shaven men were more reliable in certain professions and praise Bolton’s “sexually dynamic Mustached American lifestyle.”
Bolton, whose bodacious mustache is pretty much the only thing setting his aesthetic apart from the herd of old white men Trump has tapped for his Cabinet, totes clapped back at the haters with a tweet defending his personal grooming, capping off a fine year for intellectual discourse in foreign policy:
The American Mustache Institute maintains that Trump’s “orange face and spaghetti squash mane” would disqualify PEOTUS from any position of power with a beauty threshold. “But beyond the esthetic and ongoing pattern of [Trump’s] embrace of an alt-right-like pattern of discrimination, the Mustached American community is deeply troubled by a new administration erecting yet another obstacle towards a level playing field for people of Mustached American heritage,” the group’s statement read. If only people with #mustaches could have mustered such strong condemnations of Trump before the election.
