Put it there, Donald

Most notable among his recent tussles has been the sustained effort to prevail against the polite Sinzo Abe, presumably to the disappointment of martial artists back home in Japan.

Better-prepared, Canada’s Justin Trudeau gripped Trump’s shoulder with his free hand to brace against the pressure while France’s newbie Emmanuel Macron engaged in a whiteknuckled, jaw-clenched arm wrestle in which neither man bothered with the pretence that it was anything other than a form of combat.

When faced with Germany’s Angela Merkel, Trump’s solution was to manage somehow not to notice her conspicuously proffered hand. That his own wife, Melania, lightly backhanded his attempt to hold her hand in public didn’t pass without notice, nor did the way he jostled the Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic aside to get in front for a NATO leaders’ photo-op.

At least when Trump met the Pope there was no manual unpleasantness, though the cameras did catch a broad smile vanishing from the pontiff’s face the instant his eye fell upon the president who also in his travels copped a stinkeye from Britain’s Theresa May.

Point being? Firstly, the man’s an oaf. Secondly, he’s an oaf who knows full well many of his supporters don’t want to see him playing nice with world leaders.

Fortress USA? Hell yeah. Sounds good to a lot of them.

They won’t particularly care that Trump on his travels told a roomful of Israelis that ‘‘we just got back from the Middle East’’, unaware he was still very much in the midst of it.

Nor that he left Merkel cautioning the rest of Europe that the US is no longer a reliable ally. Nor that NATO is looking rudderless. Nor that his predicted pullout from the Paris climate change accord flies in the face of sense, science and human survival prospects.

What they’ll see is that nobody pushed him around. No siree. What they’re not seeing is that Trump isn’t, never has been, never will be, a safe pair of hands.