According to the Washington Post, virtually every world leader and corporate CEO Trump spoke to recently, including every G7 leader and the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and Dow Chemical, urged him to maintain our commitment to the Paris climate accord, but Trump was ultimately swayed by a sentient pile of cigarette butts, Steve Bannon.
The Washington Post also reports that a stern handshake from newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron may have been the last straw.
If he needed a nudge, though, one came from France over the weekend. Macron was quoted in a French journal talking about his white-knuckled handshake with Trump at their first meeting in Brussels, where the newly elected French president gripped Trump’s hand tightly and would not let go for six long seconds in a show of alpha-male fortitude.
“My handshake was not innocent,” Macron said. He likened Trump to a pair of authoritarian strongmen — Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and said that he was purposefully forceful because he believed his encounter with Trump was “a moment of truth.”
Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said.
A few days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
You may have already seen Trump as an insecure manchild, but this somehow lowers the bar even further. Trump is the one who likes to dish out aggressive handshakes in embarrassing demonstrations of his machismo, but he apparently can't handle being on the receiving end.
He's so unsettled by it, it may have played a role in his decision to endanger the entire planet.
This man has access to nuclear weapons.