President Trump Still Hasn’t Made Handshakes Great Again

Donald Trump had another awkward exchange involving a handshake with a foreign head of state today. I feel like that’s probably going to be the lede for a lot of stories over the next four years. This time Trump’s faux pas was with Poland’s First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda, who appeared to ignore Trump’s extended hand and greeted his wife Melania before turning and accepting his handshake.

There’s a few explanations for what exactly happened. Kornhauser-Duda may have simply felt it was proper to greet her American counterpart first. Polish etiquette also dictates that a gentleman should wait for a lady to offer her hand for a handshake. But I’m pretty sure it was a misunderstanding and she just didn’t see Trump’s tiny baby hand.

This isn’t the first time Trump has made headlines over an awkward handshake. You may remember his visit with Shinzo Abe in February where he spent nineteen seconds trying to dislocate the Japanese Prime Minister’s shoulder. He also recently turned a handshake with French President and mommy enthusiast Emmanuel Macron into a white-knuckled pissing contest. Considering that all Trump ever had to do to earn his fortune was shake hands and not embarrass himself, you’d think he’d be better at both of those things. Of course, President Trump hasn’t thrown up on anyone yet, so he’s still slightly less embarrassing than former President George H. W. Bush for now. For now.

Despite the inevitable 500 part Twitter threads from the #Resistance on how this will finally be the thing that brings Trump down, for real this time, this incident appears to be much ado about nothing. Had First Lady Kornhauser-Duda actually insulted Trump, he’d have already tweeted about how her hands were bleeding or that she had #fakehands. Maybe a gif of him clotheslining Vince McMahon with a hand superimposed over McMahon’s face. You know, the way a president does.