What type of plastic surgery did Donald Trump perform?
A Brief Recap of Donald Trump’s Alleged Plastic Surgery
On Thursday morning, the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the guy who signs executive orders, got angry with a news anchor. In retaliation, he claimed she had undergone plastic surgery:
Trump was going after Mika Brzezinski, host of Morning Joe and a person he was once friends with. Despite Trump saying he no longer watches the show, the tweets came after Brzezinski said on the show, “Nothing makes a man feel better than doing a fake magazine cover on himself, to lie every day and destroy the country” (she is referring to the fake cover of Time magazine hung in several of her golf clubs). It’s a crude statement that has drawn outrage even from members of the party Trump nominally leads, but also a typical response from a public figure who has a difficult history of dealing with embarrassment.
While the unprecedented attack on a news personality by the President of the United States has raised all sorts of reasons to slap each other, let’s take this opportunity to focus on one detail: this plastic surgery case. Plastic surgery is a fairly normalized practice, especially in Los Angeles and New York, especially among the affluent elite in those cities. And Donald Trump is a wealthy elite from such a coastal province, who has demonstrated a fascination with the most superficial qualities throughout his life. Is it possible that he himself went under the knife, making his Thursday tweets both indefensible and hypocritical? Ivana Trump’s divorce deposition, which was recounted in The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by author Harry Hurt III, may have some answers.
In 1990, Ivana Trump swore that her husband had gone into a fit of rage due to pain and dissatisfaction from scalp reduction surgery, performed in 1989. Also known as scalp reduction. alopecia, the surgery aims to correct baldness and consists of cutting the bald spot and stitching the remaining skin. The tight scalp can cause headaches and swelling. The man who allegedly performed the operation was Ivana’s own doctor, Dr. Steven Hoefflin. He is best known for extending his services to Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Rivers, among other stars. Hoefflin also performed liposuction on our now president’s chin and waist, according to Ivana’s deposition. (She quashed part of the deposition, which included rape allegations, in a 2015 statement.)
So not only may Trump himself have had plastic surgery, but his Trump Taj Mahal once offered $25,000 worth of plastic surgery to a casino winner. At this point, it’s not strange for Trump to act hypocritically on any topic, especially appearance, especially women’s appearance (see his comments on Carly Fiorina, Megyn Kelly, Arianna Huffington, Rosie O’Donnell, Heidi Klum, Alicia Machado and wife of Ted Cruz). But you have to wonder why he would offer a reason to drag this unsavory association, one that he and his lawyers went to great lengths to nullify. In the Lost Tycoon, Trump denied both the incident and the plastic surgery, going out of his way to punch Hunt in the process. “That’s obviously untrue,” Trump also said in 1993, according to The Daily Beast, and originally reported by Newsday. “It’s incorrect and done by a guy with no great talent… [Hunt] is a guy who is an unattractive guy who is a vindictive and jealous person.
