Trump appears unable to tell female blonde reporters apart at press conference

THIS. The Finnish journalists @potus had trouble telling apart. They are def. 2 diff. people. So glad I met @maria_annala + @vilenpaula. pic.twitter.com/gthZWwiiJa

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) August 28, 2017

"The Finnish journalists [Trump] had trouble telling apart. They are [definitely two different] people," she wrote on Twitter.

So was it an awkward case of face blindness? Question fatigue? Or is there something further in it, in the way Donald Trump views blonde hair.

As Amy Larocca wrote in her piece, The Politics of Blondeness, in The Cut earlier this month, the new US president and parts of the US conservative media – and their surrounding political movement – has co-opted blonde hair. 

"Now, blonde is the colour of the right, for whom whiteness has become a hallmark," she wrote. "Over the past decade or so, as inclusiveness became the hallmark of Obama-era liberals, the left found feminist icons in Rachel Maddow, Samantha Power, and Michelle Obama, who make no apologies for their failure to fit traditional ideals. But #MAGA, Fox News America is a place where all the classic signifiers of privilege and wealth work on overdrive: country-club-issue blue blazers with brass buttons and khaki pants, and above all else, for women, that yellow-blonde, carefully tended hair — a dog whistle of whiteness, an unspoken declaration of values, a wink-wink to the power of racial privilege and to the 1980s vibe that pervades a movement led by a man who still believes in the guilt of the Central Park Five."

What then of those values when all blonde women look the same to the man who supposedly values them the most?