The White House flunkies are saying she “wasn’t up for the job” of course. But that is long past being a believable excuse.
And the handwashing thing is almost certainly true. Yet he shook hands like never before after this came up. Because he is a psycho:
What was remarkable about Trump’s obstinacy to that point wasn’t that he was flouting elite experts’ advice—more or less par for the course—but rather that he wasn’t jumping at this opportunity to revert to one of his strongest and longest-standing prepolitics precepts. For most of his life, he didn’t just shun shaking hands. He detested shaking hands. And he made this bugaboo of his nothing if not characteristically explicit. A self-described “germaphobe,” “germ freak” and “clean-hands freak,” Trump over the years has called the practice of the handshake “barbaric,” “disgusting,” “very, very terrible” and “one of the curses of American society.”
He so stubbornly kept shaking hands, though, in the estimation of people who know him well, even as the spread of the virus started to spike, in an instinctual effort to avoid any implicit admission that he whiffed on preparedness or miscalculated the virus’ severity and to project as well his preferred patina of sanguine vigor and insusceptibility. Symbolism superseded safety.
“He went from being a germaphobe to being a germaholic,” former Trump Organization executive vice president Louise Sunshine told me.
“It’s a subconscious, if not conscious, way of saying, ‘Relax! Everything’s OK!’ Because if everything is not OK, he was wrong, and he can never be wrong,” added Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist. “It’s more important for him to be right than to do right.”
“What I’ve been thinking on this issue of one of the more famous germaphobes in the world sort of deliberately shaking hands recently,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair said, “is that it seemed to have been some kind of show of strength—excuse me, of presumed strength—and invulnerability, a way to telegraph that he is not cowed, not scared, not going to be intimidated.”
In the Rose Garden last Friday, for instance, when he declared a national emergency, “two very big words,” as he put it, Trump also nonetheless shook a bunch of hands. He shook hands with the CEO of Walmart. He shook hands with the CEO of Target. He shook hands with the CEO of Quest Diagnostics. He shook hands with the president of Walgreens. He shook hands with a vice president of CVS. And he tried to shake hands with an executive from the health care company called LHC Group.
Bruce Greenstein, however, left him hanging, instead offering a best-practices elbow bump.
Trump responded with a slight grimace, a sucking in of air, and an awkward attempt to touch elbows.
“Practice that,” Greenstein said.
Everything he did was the opposite of what should have done. Everything.