The recent ‘hand jiu-jitsu’ with Keir Starmer is just the latest awkward exchange between the US president and world leaders. As Keir Starmer handed Donald Trump his unprecedented invitation from King Charles – a second state visit – he grasped the US president chummily by the shoulder, more than once.
Starmer was skating a tricky line, between matey familiarity and patronising reassurance, which must have been tutored, as he’s not a tactile man. Trump’s body language looked completely untaught, because nobody could teach this. The man has always been incredibly idiosyncratic.
He has his hands pointed downwards in what experts of non-verbal communication call “the steeple”, for obvious reasons. Yet, as Joe Navarro, the former FBI agent and author of (most recently) The Dictionary of Body Language, told me: “This is not uncommon, Elon Musk does it, Angela Merkel did it – but they tend to put them very high, utterly confident. Here you have the president’s, which is a modified steeple, where he loses its strength by pointing it downward.” It’s a gesture he often makes with world leaders – exactly the same image exists with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, except the Ukrainian president looks more annoyed – and it’s far from the only cue that he’s unsure or uncomfortable.
But how does that work? Because Trump, famously, loves trying to dominate with his body language. Images abound of him and Macron practically wrestling, in their efforts to outgrip each other. “We saw this in the first term,” Navarro continues, “when he was shaking hands with the [Shinzo Abe], the tight handshake, the pulling behaviours Trump has some awkward exchanges with the Japanese prime minister.
“It reminds me of some of the garbage that was being peddled about establishing dominance in the 1980s. You’ll be superior if you squeeze tight, or if your hand is on top, or if you bring them closer to your chest. There is nothing either empirical or scientific that says that playing hand jiu-jitsu makes the other person respect you more. What it does do, particularly in cultures that are context rich, it makes you look amateurish.”.
The two world leaders engaged in a 19-second handshake that didn’t appear to end well. Trump also has a repertoire of disdainful or disgusted facial gestures – he purses his lips tightly if he hears anything he dislikes, his commissure (the side of the mouth) pinches dramatically, which is usually a look of contempt. “He immediately reflects with his face exactly what he feels,” Navarro says, “And that’s quite a New York style – Brooklyn or Queens. You wouldn’t see that in middle America, people are more reserved in their expression.”.
Other gestures that have played badly in a context-rich environment include holding Theresa May’s hand and walking ahead of the Queen – “That’s not a little faux pas, that’s a major faux pas,” Navarro says, but interprets those as “klutzy” rather than calculated to dominate.
The president has a number of contradictorily vulnerable behaviours. “In pictures in the White House, or when he’s surrounded by people, he crosses his arms very tight around himself, and that is a comforting behaviour. It’s literally a self-hug. And yet when we see him on The Apprentice, he never did that. You normally don’t expect leaders to be self-hugging. You expect them to have expansive behaviours,” Navarro says.
All of which pales in significance besides a picture of Trump and the Russian president. “Look at the arm swing on Putin versus the very stoic, demure, arms at the side, head low behaviours of Trump,” Navarro says. “I could hardly believe my eyes. It matters. We are primates. We evolved from primates. You don’t have to be told who the leader is. If you’re the silverback, you stand proud, you stand tall, you have the behaviours of confidence. That is nowhere to be seen with Trump.”.
Dr Nicholas Newton-Fisher, a primate behavioural ecologist at the University of Kent, counsels that we should not only see our evolution from chimps in terms of power play, they also “do a lot of subtle touching but these gestures tend to be affiliative or reassuring, or seeking reassurance, and you see commonalities here with humans”.
In the press conference with Starmer, a reporter asked the US president if British troops were attacked by Russian forces while in Ukraine, Starmer could count on the US’s support. Trump replied that the British were incredible fighters and could take care of themselves, relenting in a generalised way that he would “always stand with the British”, accompanied by a little spontaneous hand-hold, coming from underneath, that took Starmer by surprise.
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