Trump: the body language of an apha male

Donald Trump isn’t good with words, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. But that’s OK, because his body language – and that of the people around him – speaks volumes. The story of his first big foreign trip, for example, can be told through its moments of excruciating physical chemistry. In Israel, there was “the swat heard around the world” – when, striding up a red carpet, Trump reached for his wife Melania’s hand but was brusquely batted away. At the Vatican, he grinned cheesily for a picture with the Pope, who stared ahead with “a mien as joyless as a gulag”, while Melania – dressed in black, and wearing a black lace veil – adopted an expression of deep mourning. The image went viral on social media, with the caption: “Dress for the job you want. #widow.”

But the “body language battles” really kicked off in Brussels, said Jon Henley in The Guardian. At a meeting of Nato leaders, Trump physically shoved Montenegro’s prime minister aside in order to get to the front of the group, before drawing himself up tall and sticking out his jaw for the cameras. Like any “alpha male”, Trump uses body language to “assert his superiority”, said Gyles Brandreth in the Daily Mail. His usual method is the crushing handshake, accompanied by an arm wrench that bends his victim into a posture of subservience. (Shinzo Abe, the Japanese PM, survived a 19-second power grip, at the end of which he rolled his eyes and sighed.) But in Brussels, Trump finally met his match – in the form of Emmanuel Macron, France’s youngest ever (and fittest) president. As the two men locked hands, their grips tightened until the knuckles turned white. Trump tried to disengage twice before Macron, jaw clenched, relinquished his hand. Afterwards, Macron boasted: “My handshake with him – it wasn’t innocent… It was a moment of truth.”

If Trump’s behaviour is childish, said David Usborne in The Independent, so is stagemanaging events “to make him look foolish”. Trump may be petulant and oafish, but he’s also chronically insecure (not that you’d know it from his “shoulder pads and cockatiel hair”). If we want the leader of the free world “to be in a better mood, we need to be nicer to him”.