By Josh Gondelman — 01 Sep 2025

#147. Donald Trump's Hand Makeup Artist and You

"They are not yours/they are my own." - Jewel/Donald Trump

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Hi everyone,

The weather in my neighborhood has been beautiful lately, so Maris and I have done a lot of outdoor dining and general bopping around to see friends and walk Maggie the pug. It was a great weekend for what I'm going to call diegetic sound even though that term doesn't quite apply. If you don't know, "diegetic" music in a movie or tv show is when a song exists within the world of the story and can be heard by the characters. On Saturday, we experienced a fascinating and diverse soundtrack out in the world. When we left the house in the morning, we witnessed an older woman in an electric wheelchair absolutely grooving to latin music I did not recognize but was delighted by. Then, as we sat outside eating breakfast, a guy in a work van drove by and we caught him at the stop light BELTING Ed Sheeran's "Thinking About Things" which I don't especially like but did recognize although I had to look up the name. On our way home from our second birthday party of the day, we heard "All We Do" by Jeezy just blasting out of a fancy-looking sports car. Hearing the ways people choose to score their days, just for a moment, feels like eavesdropping but without learning secrets (so, slightly less thrilling).

I love hearing a song in a specific context of someone else's choosing. I would sometimes rather hear a song that I like less in an unexpected situation than a song I like more in my own headphones. (Although I will say I am grateful that my upstairs neighbor has given up practicing "City of Stars" from the La La Land soundtrack on their electric piano.) We also did karaoke on Sunday night, and what's karaoke if not an opportunity to listen to unexpected songs of other people's choosing. People arrived a couple at a time, and it was fun to see who unknowingly picked a duplicate artist to someone who had come before (not that that's against the rules, but it did seem inadvertent). Dashboard Confessional was well represented last night, if you were trying to pinpoint the age range of those in attendance. Not to brag, but Maris and I performed a stirring rendition of "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence (in the name of aviation safety) until Maris realized that she didn't know that many of the words after all. (I got to do the easy, shouty guy part, so I was able to stay the course.)

Maris's birthday is coming up on Friday, so we've been doing a lot of fun stuff under the auspices of holiday/birthday week confluence. We are going to see Rilo Kiley on Friday in New York and anticipate running into a thousand people we know and a thousand more couples that look like we should know them even if we don't. I am excited!

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it's Labor Day in the United States! Globally, people generally celebrate this holiday on May Day, but much like with Earth Day, Americans celebrate whenever the heck we want no matter what anyone else says (not a brag, more of a lament). The NYC Labor Day Parade takes place this coming Saturday because everyone who needs to be yelled at by an entire parade as well as many people who plan to march left town over the holiday weekend. But I'm excited to attend as part of the Writers Guild of America East contingent. Organized labor has given me, personally, a lot, and I think it's one of the most important forces for good that we have. So, let's hear it for unions. I don't think it's legally advisable for me to suggest that you celebrate by dumping a bunch of toilet water into the servers at an AI data center, but I don't know that I can be prosecuted for saying it's something I think about a lot.

This week, I'm zipping around Brooklyn for shows: I'm hanging out at Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall tonight, doing a set on a little fundraiser at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg on Tuesday at 10pm, and riffing about bad video games on Mike Drucker's "Shit Arcade" show also at Union Hall on Thursday!

This Saturday, Alison Leiby and I are hosting our semi-regular "Sup, Bro?" show (also at Union Hall, can you believe it?) with lots of funny friends. KC Shornima from SNL has just been added to the lineup! It'll be a great time! Alison wrote a lot about the silly chaos of co-hosting a show together in her most recent newsletter, which I love!!!

Couple more quick things: My next headlining gig is on 9/13 at the Fairfield Comedy Circle in Connecticut, and I'm doing a live Wait Wait taping on 9/18 in St. Louis! Plus I'm hosting a fun Wait Wait-adjacent show that's almost sold out at the Bell House in Brooklyn on 9/12!

A LITTLE PLUG

The very smart and talented writer Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman has a book coming out this month called The Double Tax. It's about the extra financial pressures that are put on women of color. There might be a little more about it in this newsletter coming up, but I wanted to put the book on your radar since preorders are so important for authors. (Anna was very helpful to me when I was writing about dads who stand to watch tv for GQ.)

Oh and also my friend Aubrey Hirsch's book Graphic Rage arrived in the mail last week and I'm psyched to dig in. It is also about feminism, so I included it here with my plug for Anna's work! A little peek behind the curtain...the curtain of...MY MIND!

PEP TALK FOR DONALD TRUMP'S HAND MAKEUP ARTIST

Donald Trump's hands, one of which looks kind of normal the other of which looks like it was run over by a motorcycle. — Nothing weird or zombifying going on here, I'm sure! (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image)

We all have our bad days at work, but rarely are they as bad as the few you've strung together of late. Whoever was in charge of slapping an inch-thick coat of house paint or cadaver spackling onto the president's decaying carapace (or as I call it, his "necrod bod") failed to conjure up a sufficiently opaque cosmetic goo to conceal the fact that the United States's Commander in Chief is suffering from some kind of Hand Death. And between Trump's zombified appendage and his dearth of recent public appearances, people have started getting the idea that Trump's body has followed his long-defunct mind into the great beyond. That's about as rough a week as you can have as a makeup artist, having the subject of your work still look so sickly that rumors of his demise begin to spread as widely as Hand Poisoning (?) has spread across his skin.

Some people have suggested that the colossal bruise on Donald Trump's right hand is the result of repeated intravenous injections to treat one malady or another. And it's certainly easy to believe he's in regular style poor health. Trump is an elderly person whose job would cause immense stress on anyone with the cognitive capacity to understand what it entails (jury still out on whether he possesses that capacity), and his diet is like something Mr. Beast would make 100 people subsist on for a month to see if anyone keels over.

But let's be open minded here. Perhaps there's another explanation. Maybe Trump fell out of Air Force 1 while it was in the sky and had his fall broken by the back of his hand. Maybe he tried to backhand slap a statue of a horse that he mistook for one of his idiot sons. Maybe he saw a person of color succeeding at their job and he clenched his fist so hard Arthur-style that all the blood vessels contained inside burst like Fourth of July fireworks. Let's be circumspect, people.

Regardless of the cause of Trump's recent doom splotch, he was either unwilling or unable to cover it up. Both options are legitimate possibilities. After all, the president is immensely vain and has horrible taste. That's why he wants the White House to look like King Midas rubbed his ass all over the walls. (Did King Midas's ass turn things to gold too? I'm not going to look this up.) So there is a chance that he thinks having a hand so pulverized it could reasonably be described as "falling off the bone" makes him look cool and tough. The other option is that whatever infirmity has afflicted his hand has indeed been partially concealed and it actually looks way worse than we know. Either way, it reflects poorly on the person professionally responsible for making this absolute monster look like a living, breathing human and not a first-draft so wretched that Dr. Frankenstein himself would have punted him off a cliff. Does this sound a little mean? Good! It's fun to be mean to people who deserve it! And my dad won't try to temper my mean jokes about Trump the way he sometimes suggests I'm too harsh towards Mark Wahlberg.

Eight years ago, during Donald Trump's first term as president, a contingent of enterprising internet grifters would have claimed that Trump's visible and unexplained bodily harm was the result of a makeup artist who was part of some secret government resistance, dedicated to making the president look frail on the world stage. Obviously that's not the case, and no one from that contingent is left to suggest that now. Those people are all wealthy from making up political fan fiction or were outed as predators, or both. But as a little solace, I will say that seeing one of the world's true modern villains sustain physical damage has brought a lot of people joy. And the possibility that natural causes had quietly claimed him after nearly eight decades of suffering no consequences for the way he treated his body or anyone else's had people across America (and probably the globe) ready to celebrate like all thirty-two NFL teams won the Super Bowl at once. There's also the chance that we'll get to bonus-laugh if conservatives seize on Trump's megabruise as a badge of honor and start getting tattoos of it on their own hands. My (unbruised) fingers are crossed for this outcome.

So thank you, hand makeup artist, for reminding us of a bad person's frailty whether it was through neglect, incompetence, or the sheer impossibility of the task you were assigned. You failed spectacularly, and in so doing you brought a lot of people a little happiness.

PEP TALK FOR TWO READERS

I paired these two requests because they're somewhat related and it's that back to school time of year. And of course I applied the nicknames.

I am gearing up to start the new semester at UMass-Boston. Given the state of, well, everything, I'm a little worried about my students' state of being.
- Mass Appall

Another education person here! Twenty years in elementary public education, and my job keeps getting cut. Not what needs to be done just my hours and pay. This year I have six (6!) extra duties to keep my insurance & current pay. But my district spent lots on an AI program! I love my kids with my whole heart but I'm so tired.
- ExhaustEd.

A little over a month ago, I wrote a pep talk for a teacher who was frustrated by the encroachment of AI into their classroom. Sadly, educators face even more challenges than just the highly paid, semi-skilled robots being forced on them by administrators and sometimes students. Under good circumstances, it's tricky enough to implement a curriculum that communicates varied and complex ideas to a wide swath of a student body. Kids are smart and curious and adaptable, but they can also be anxious and easily bored and varyingly able to keep up with assignments. Every teacher was once a kid, and some of them weren't even especially diligent students, so they know this better than anyone. (No offense to teachers! People change, is all I'm saying!)

Creeps and charlatans have dragged us into an era where cruel dumbasses (and intellectually capable sociopaths) are ascendant. They don't want anyone else to be informed or economically independent or politically empowered. A lot of people are suffering, which (sadly) means that it's incumbent on the rest of us to work double hard to make things better. Teachers are on the front lines of this effort because schools have become figurative (distressing) and literal (terrifying) battlegrounds.

It feels completely deranged that the notion "Kids might learn more if they didn't have their phones in the classroom." is often (logically and devastatingly) countered with "But what about school shootings?" But that is reality! Organizations like Moms Against Literacy (going from memory on this one, don't correct me please) want to tear any book with more contemporary gender and sexuality politics than The Bible out of libraries. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who seems on the verge of physically bursting like a pimple at any moment, is apparently in the pocket of Big Measles, a lobby that I didn't even know existed. There are so many horrors in the world, and teachers are on the front lines of a lot of them.

WITH THAT BEING SAID!!!! Most people are on your side! Even the kind of picky helicopter parents who will call in and complain that your textbooks are too sharp because their kid got a paper cut want, deep down, for you to succeed at your job. Even the kind of unruly students who make armpit farts (do kids even do that anymore?) through an entire lesson benefits when you are able to connect with them. So many people, even the really annoying ones, believe in you and rely on you. And that's a lot to put on your shoulders. But you're not the only people being strained to the limit right now. A vast portion of the population whose job is to do good (librarians, scientists, civil servants) and even more people than that (although there's overlap for sure) are under attack for who they are (immigrants, queer people, people of color, anybody who can be pregnant, disabled people, DC residents, etc.). And we've got to work together to make everybody's life as okay as possible.

I know that "Good luck out there...we're all counting on you!" is not a helpful thing to say when you are under resourced and exhausted. So instead I'll say...good luck out there, we're all counting on us.

I'm a little annoyed at how sincere and political I've been lately, but I will continue to be a pain in the ass until circumstances improve. Sorry, readers!!!

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Sinead O'Connor - "Mandinka"

Embarrassingly, I had never heard this song before (that I know of) but my friend Bex was delighted to find it in the karaoke book (okay, app) on Sunday night, and her performance got me onboard, so I'm sharing it here! End of story!