What Joe Biden's Unsettling Orange Face Is Really Telling Us

It's a vivid symbol of everything he's doing wrong right now.

Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Wanna feel old? The first 2024 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was exactly two weeks ago. Two weeks! 

We’ve each aged about 100 years since then, and here on the blog we’ve invited you to lose your minds along with us as we’ve raged, doom-spiraled, considered the options, raged some more, tried to infiltrate some sick minds, and yes, raged even more.  

I’m not here to do any of that (jk I am!). I’m here to make an aesthetic, though not superficial, inquiry. Simply: What is up with the hue of Biden’s face?

Don’t get me wrong, Biden’s visage has been on a weird journey for years now. I’m not talking about the basic ravages of time—we’re all subject to those!—but rather the attempts to distract from said ravages. Again, we are all subject to that folly! Not all of us have Demi Moore’s plastic surgeon, and not all of us have good beauty instincts. But we also don’t have teams of people whose entire job is helping perfect our physical appearance. For Biden… choices have been made, and not all of them have been good.

I can’t begin to speculate on Botox or facelifts (we’ve been there, done that), but in the 14 days since the debate, Biden has taken on a particularly, uh, burnt appearance. It’s a road he’s been heading down for some time already, but we’ve really hit new levels recently. Just look at him during his interview last week with George Stephanopoulos, in which he almost seamlessly blends in with the tan bookshelves behind him. It’s sort of eerie! 

YouTube

Now okay, I’m not the first person to notice or remark on this, but let’s go beyond the observation. What, exactly, is happening here? 

Look, every makeup-wearing person on earth goes through a period in their life of troubleshooting shades. I’m decades into the makeup-wearing era of my life and I still find myself agonizing over whether I’m more of a “Creme Brulee” or a “Café Au Lait.” I too have spent many sleepless nights watching YouTube videos to understand my skin’s undertone and find my color season so that I might someday transcend into the rarefied realm of seemingly effortless beauty. And yet, even with my many, many struggles, I still have never ever shellacked on enough bronzer to evoke thoughts of candied yams in the mind of my beholders. 

What gives Joe? Why at this particular moment in time would you make the choice to go the way of (I’m sorry) the Cheeto? 

Maybe it’s not actually that deep. This a man who is careening quite rapidly toward his professional, and possibly literal, deathbed in a field that relies heavily on appearance. In fact, the outsized importance of good looks in modern American politics began in many ways with the televised debates between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Read this description from LIFE (lol). The italics are theirs: 

The details of the debates have been recounted innumerable times in the subsequent decades. The stories, meanwhile, of how Nixon showed up to the very first debate looking pale and glistening with sweat beneath the glare of the studio lights, while JFK looked (literally) tanned and rested, haven’t lost any of their power simply because they’re true.

The photos here back up those stories: Nixon did look like death warmed over; Kennedy did look like a movie star. And while pundits and armchair historians like to assert that Kennedy’s media savvy won him the election while Nixon won the debates, no data exists anywhere that positively proves either point.

Yes, yes, tan! That’s the key!! So… is Biden trying to take a page out of the 60-year-old JFK playbook to convince us all that he’s young, rested, and full of vim and vigor? If so, there’s a problem: JFK was actually (relatively) young, rested, and full of vim and vigor. He also had charisma and mental acuity (relatively). Putting a heavy tan on Biden doesn’t make him look younger, it just makes him look like an old catcher's mitt. It’s unclear whether his shade is illustrative of a general lack of skill, or simply the best attempt at an impossible job. 

So, is it actually stupid to dissect Biden’s face when it feels like there are more important things on the table, i.e. that we’re being subjected to national gaslighting and headed toward certain destruction? No, because in many ways, his face is the point.

It’s emblematic of so much of what’s happening here. We don’t know how long Biden’s inner circle has been lying to the public about his state, but it’s clearly been a very long time. Now that the world is clued into just how far gone he is, it seems the best they can do is put a coat of paint on him and see if that helps.

And Cheeto references aside, it’s also apt that this transformation puts Biden in closer physical proximity to Trump, as his own Trumpian proclivities become more and more apparent. The president of the United States is actively deceiving the public about his health. His family, staff, and others are colluding in that deception by any means necessary. And even when blatantly exposed, he refuses to stand down. He’s even stooped to the depths of attempting pathetic macho jabs at George fucking Clooney.

This is all deeply Trump-coded, and if Trump were doing the same thing, many of Biden’s most hardcore defenders would be in hysterics. That’s how bad things are with Biden. He has no choice but to try to match Trump’s game in every way. He’s been doing it all along in a certain sense, but now he’s not even bothering to hide it. He’s wearing it right on his face. 

I have zero sympathy for Joe Biden, but I do understand this particular impulse. And as someone who once engaged in tanning myself, let me say in no uncertain terms that it’s a sign of deep, untethered insecurity. A man who was self-assured and confident would let his pale skin fly free. Orange Joe is instead the final form of someone who is behaving exactly like I did when I was 11 years old, cut my bangs into a ragged, impossibly short spiky row, and then put on a bright lime green shirt hoping no one would notice the hack job. Honestly, that diversion might have been more successful. Also while we’re here I’ll just say this: I suspect Joe’s aviators will do a lot of work in the coming months if he stays in this race. 

Will he stay in the race? Good god, I hope not. But his insistence on sticking it out until now has continued to astound me. It’s crazy-making and disheartening. It’s a display of megalomania that might surpass even Trump’s. It’s an extreme show of self-interest and self-preservation that’s fully antithetical to what his party purports to be about. That tendency toward individualism over collectivism is one we keep seeing among leadership in the Democratic Party, and supposed progressives. Huh! What conclusions are we to draw about such behavior? One could understandably conclude based on the evidence that these figures are akin to authoritarians in progressive clothing—liberals who sleep with a copy of The Fountainhead under their pillows. They are not interested in the cause, or in the people they claim to serve. 

It’s not like there was much of a question before, but now the wolf is out, baring his teeth and bronzer, and refusing to move. In trying to solidify his personal legacy, Joe Biden is instead enshrining a much darker one, and taking us with him in the process. It would be a poetic parable if it wasn’t so catastrophic for the rest of us.