The Awkward Body Language of Donald Trump
Our golden-haired leader is no silver-tongued devil, but that’s O.K. What he lacks in verbal zingers he makes up for with physical ones.
Body language — both his and that of the pitiable people around him — is telling the story of Donald Trump’s foreign adventure better than anything else.
When I say “pitiable,” I’m thinking about the pope, of course, and the first lady, naturally, but especially Dusko Markovic, the prime minister of Montenegro, who was the visibly stunned victim of the shove heard round the world.
Please tell me you saw it. Markovic, Trump and other heads of state were arranging themselves for a photograph. And Markovic had the misfortune to be standing between Trump and the front of the pack, a lesser beauty in the bossy prom queen’s path.
But not for long! Trump batted him out of the way, perhaps mistaking him for a political reporter or picturing James Comey. Then, triumphal, Trump straightened his suit jacket, stiffened his posture and raised his fleshy chin. He was ready for his close-up.
With Trump, struts, scowls and pouts reveal every bit as much as what tumbles from his lips, which is a lot less trustworthy. His words can be counterfeit. His gestures are genuine. So it only makes sense that we lean on them for the narrative of his post-truth presidency, whose latest, foreign chapter brimmed with more awkward physicality than a toddlers’ gymnastics class.
The shove heard round the world was preceded by the curtsy heard round the world, when Trump did precisely what he maligned President Obama for — well, one of the countless things he maligned President Obama for — and approached Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Salman, in a pose of deference. Hypocrisy, thy name is Trump, and thy knees are bent and thy head is bowed.
Thy sense of rhythm doesn’t exist. Did you see him during that Saudi dance, not so much rattling his saber as dangling it while he wobbled, like a Weeble, from side to side? I imagined the following dialogue balloon above his head: “When I told the king I was a swordsman, this wasn’t what I meant.”
And the dialogue balloon above Pope Francis’s head when he posed with Trump in Vatican City later in the week would have said: “Forgive me, Father, for I cannot fake delight.” I’ve been told by Vatican insiders that the pope never forgets that he’s on camera and that the precise angle of his eyes and curl of his lips are being captured. He stared straight ahead, his mien as joyless as a gulag.
George Bernard Shaw wrote a play titled “Arms and the Man.” Someday somebody will write a Trump biography titled “Hands and the Man.”
From Spy magazine’s long-ago caricature of Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” to that unforgettable moment during a Republican presidential debate when he displayed his digits to try to prove the opposite — Look, Ma, big hands! — his paws have been at center stage.
That remained true on the trip. In Israel, there was the swat heard round the world, when, walking alongside Bibi Netanyahu across a red carpet, he noticed that Netanyahu was holding his wife’s hand and so reached back for Melania’s.
Source:- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/sunday/the-awkward-language-of-donald-trumps-body.html
