It’s not that he can’t stop talking about how his hands are perfectly fine—almost large, actually, but he buys a glove sized slightly smaller than large—you might call it a medium—it’s that everyone else keeps talking about his hands. For decades now, people have been making jokes about Trump’s hands, really only Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, but other people too, and Trump just has to defend himself. He is not sensitive about his hands. Not at all. His hands are great. Great, strong hands. Very confident in his hands. These hands would crush a grip tester. Not that he would ever take one—no reason to test these hands.
They are great American hands. And that’s why Donald Trump had to spend 612 words explaining his hands in an interview about foreign policy with The Washington Post’s editorial board. Here is an excerpt of what Trump said about his hands. Yes, an excerpt—there is even more hand commentary in the transcript, in which the word “hands” occurs 23 times.
TRUMP: No, I had to do it. Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands.
MARCUS: You’re on the cover.
TRUMP: A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. Nobody other than Graydon Carter years ago used to use that. My hands are normal hands. During a debate, he was losing, and he said, “Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.” This was not me. This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it. So, what I said a couple of days later … and what happened is I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say … now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.
MARCUS: You chose to raise it …
TRUMP: No, I chose to respond.
MARUS: You chose to respond.
TRUMP: I had no choice.