If you could smell like any U.S. president, who would it be?
I’d probably avoid anyone from more than a century ago, because we’ve made huge strides in plumbing and access to running water since then, and antiperspirant technology has definitely evolved. I now see roll-ons advertising 72-hour protection. If you’re trusting and testing that promise, please stand at least six feet from me.
And I think Ronald Reagan has the olfactory edge over Richard Nixon. We humans excrete chemicals consistent with our emotions — hence the belief that our dogs can read our distress — and Reagan’s smiling confidence surely had a better bouquet (maybe myrrh and tonka bean) than Nixon’s twitchy resentment (I’m guessing cabbage soup and kerosene).
Before this week, such musings might have seemed off-topic. Now they’re on the nose. On Sunday, Donald Trump digressed from the painstaking policy development, careful vetting of potential staff members and high-minded diplomacy that consume so very much of his time to announce the release of a new line of Trump colognes and perfumes. And so we must wonder: Does the patchouli make the president? Must the leader of the free world also be the leader of the fragrant one?
Like Trump himself, Trump the scent is big on braggadocio, short on details and gaudily packaged. The Trump Fragrance site calls it the Fight Fight Fight Collection (all uppercase, no commas), which it says is for “Patriots Who Never Back Down” and is “Your Rallying Cry In A Bottle.” I’m tempted to order some just for the conversation: “Frank, what is that you’re wearing?” “Why, it’s a rallying cry!”
The site doesn’t say whether Fight Fight Fight men’s cologne and Fight Fight Fight women’s perfume are much different from each other. Or whether they’re different from Victory 47 men’s cologne and Victory 47 women’s perfume, both of which allude to Trump’s situation as the about-to-be 47th president of our odoriferous nation and come in bottles with golden Trump figurines standing tall, speciously chesty and suspiciously svelte atop their caps.
The site also offers little information about the fragrances’ top notes or debased notes — sorry, base notes — so whether you’ll wind up smelling like a Florida flower garden, a New Jersey pine forest or a Washington swamp is a mystery. Could be any of Trump’s habitats!
