The eyes are of a piece with the skin. They provide context for each other. Each of Trump’s eyes is encircled in a corona of pale white, reflecting the place where the eye covering goes during the spray tan process or what he wears over them in the tanning bed.
The eyes are distinguished from other eyes by virtue of their separateness from the rest of him. They speak to the possibility of an “inner Trump” . . . not the exterior, golden, audacious skin-suit, but the pale, sun-starved cave-dwelling Trump within.
And, for the purposes of relevance iconography, like all Trump features, both physical and stylistic, they draw us in — either affirmatively, asking “I wonder if there’s something here for me to pay attention to?” or negatively, asking “What unearthly thing is going on here that I need to be on guard against?”
Trump’s eyes beg to be stared at.
Again, we can only conclude that it is this way on purpose. The stark contrast between the skin and the eyes — the gold and the white — is something he could be easily fix if he wanted to. For most spray tan customers, the goal is evenness, continuity, naturalness — creating the illusion of something that has been achieved as the result of healthy, active living, not purchased. For Trump it is the opposite. It is discontinuity, calling attention to the purchase, to the transaction, to the disruption between presentation and reality.
The eyes say don’t send a straightforward message. The eyes ask a question of us about themselves. They say, “I have done something to create eyes that are this way. What do you think I’m up to?”
Trump’s eyes beg to be stared at . . . not because they have a message for you, like, say, the eyes of your Labrador retriever when he wants to go outside and play. Your dog’s eyes are silently telling you something precise and charming. Trump’s eyes beg to be stared at because they are telling you nothing except “I have a message for you if you stare a little closer.”
They convey shallowness masquerading as depth, two dimensions masquerading as three-dimensions like the op art you could find at the mall in the late 80s where, if you stared long enough and in the right way, a dolphin or shark would appear.
Memento Mori
Through the agency of his eyes most of all, Trump is a representative of the phenomenon known as “The Uncanny Valley.” This is a term coined by Japanese robotics scientist Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe his observation that robots become deeply disconcerting to human observers at the point where they come closest to mimicking human features.
Mori observed a steady increase in human appreciation of and connection to robots the more human they appeared, but identified a precipitous drop in acceptance and comfort at the point where robots are almost but not quite fully human in appearance. Beyond that point, Mori surmised, robots could climb back out of the Uncanny Valley as they became not just “uncannily” similar (but still recognizably different) from humans toward the point where they were indistinguishable from humans.
From this perspective, Trump’s eyes explain a lot. They tell us that, for some observers (those of us who can’t imagine supporting him), he lives deeply in the bottom of Mori’s Uncanny Valley. But for other observers, he lives on either side of it, either on the pre-valley side (where we recognize him a non-human fiction who is nonetheless engaging and charming) or perhaps on the post-valley side (where his robotic strangeness is indistinguishable from actual humanity).
In either case, he presents as a puzzle to be figured out, a mysterious object to be inspected, like an exotic zoo animal or a painting by Klimt.