Credit: Dangerous Minds / Gage Skidmore / The White House

So, one thing you’ve got to understand about the psychology of the (at the time of writing) current President of the United States, Donald Trump, is that he fundamentally doesn’t understand politics and basically sees every interaction with another human being as squaring up to a rival.

I know it’s rich to be talking about the psychology of a man whose brain resembles cauliflower cheese at the moment. In fact, perhaps why his body’s trying so hard to reject it at the moment, it thinks it’s a vegetable.

However, this was the case long before the POTUS began succumbing to the clear and obvious signs of dementia that are, God willing, bringing his presidency to a swift and painful end. Even when he was the picture of health (lol), he was still this much of a schoolyard bully at best and a predator at worst.

One can see this, as many people have, in something as simple as his handshakes. Trump never had the intellectual capacity or basic understanding of his job to know that a president meets foreign heads of state to collaborate with them and find a way for both countries to help each other out for the benefit of their citizens. Trump has never had any interest in helping American citizens and instead uses any photo op with a head of state as a way of proving his supposed physical superiority over them.

That contest begins from the moment they meet. Trump might not remember Melania’s name, but he knows when cameras are on him, and thus, when he meets anyone, he tends not to so much shake their hand as try to pull their arm out of their socket. The intention being, of course, to discredit whoever he’s meeting from the moment he meets them and use his burly frame to make them look weak in front of the entire world.

Y’know, like a ten-year-old would.

Why does Trump do this?

As with most things Trump does, it’s easy to speculate on the reason he does this. On the surface, the psychology of it is so simple that a bucket of sand could understand it. Trump wants to seem like a big man in charge of everything, and other men are a threat to this; ergo, discredit them and embarrass them by appearing stronger than them.

Why else do you think he nearly pulled then-Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe off his feet before patting him on the head like a rambunctious toddler?

Yet, here’s the thing about Trump. Everything he says, one can find a direct contradiction in the man himself. In 1999, he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he found the whole process of shaking hands a “very, very terrible custom” and has since called it “barbaric” and “disgusting”. This was because the failed businessman was a self-described germophobe and neat freak who hated the very idea of other people’s germs.

Which in and of itself is a contradiction. After all, one of the reasons that Covid-19 became a global pandemic was its failure to be taken seriously as a threat. Throughout the pandemic, he could be found complaining about masks and forcing his handshakes on all and sundry. Things that a supposed germophobe would rather chew their own toes off than do, especially during a global pandemic. So, what can we learn about Donald Trump through his handshakes?

That he doesn’t really think about anything. He just says and does whatever floats through what’s left of his brain, and we’re all the real morons trying to ascribe his actions meaning where there isn’t, and has never been any.