I dare you to look at Trump’s mouth for more than 30 seconds. It’s upsetting.
Once again, it adds to Trump’s iconography of relevance because, no matter what you think of him, the mouth begs to be stared at owing to its strangeness, its uncanniness.
It is a mouth that is radically different from other human mouths. It is, to use a word found frequently in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, “eldritch.” It has an eerie otherworldliness.
Next to Trump’s hair, it is his most parodied and commented upon physical feature. In photos online, his face is frequently Photoshopped and caricatured in ways that make his mouth huge or emphasize its strangeness or even — most disturbingly — replace his eyes and nose with identical mouths.
When at rest, the mouth does often does not relax but returns to a puckered, circular kissing shape that has been described as an “elongated Cheerio,” suggesting that it is at once both open and closed, an orifice of both inbound and outbound potential.
Why would this mouth attract the attention of a significant segment of the electorate? Precisely because of its eerie difference. Trump’s mouth is relevant because satisfies the appetite of some people for a completely different political mouth. And it seizes the attention of others because, like a bloody car accident, we can’t look away.
To those enraged at the falseness of other mouths (the mouths of the political, media and economic elite that have let them down), Trump’s mouth is hyper-real and in its weird fleshiness, suggests an authenticity, the way a blood rare steak suggests “real food.”
The mouth also has an anal quality to it. Is always pantomiming an expulsion of waste. It is always conveying expulsion of impurity, mirroring Trump’s promises to eject things and people — Mexicans, Muslims, protesters at his rallies and so on.
The shape of the mouth as an emblem of disgust and expulsion is also connected to Trump’s frequent interest in what comes out of human bodies, especially the bodies of women. It enacts his revulsion at excretion (see his comments on Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate), menstruation (see his comments on Megyn Kelly’s question to him at the first Republican debate) and breast feeding (see his remarks related to breast pumping from 2011).
He consistently uses the word “disgusting” . . . a word that in its origins suggests the expulsion of a thing based on taste, an operation of the mouth.
But Trump’s lips are not pursed in a disgusted frown against entry of the disgusting thing. Trump’s mouth is always open in an odd cloacal circle, doing two things at once, taking in (in order to judge on the basis of taste) and spitting out.
He is unlike other Republicans who are characteristically “tight-lipped.” Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney are classic examples of this, Republicans with small mouths pursed tightly against the entrance of the disgusting thing. Trump’s mouth is different. It tells people, the disgusting thing is already inside — not yet inside the stomach, but inside the mouth — and must be ejected.
Trump’s mouth is not a mouth of unequivocal rejection, like Cruz’s mouth or Romney’s. It is a mouth that says, “I tried that and it’s disgusting. It has to be spit out.” So, among his supporters, when Trump “talks shit,” he is symbolically given a pass because it has the physiological status of a counterpunch. He can get away with saying the “disgusting” thing because he is “spitting out” the disgusting thing that almost — but not quite, thank goodness — got into the body.