I’m just putting this here for posterity:
For a US president obsessed by size – his hands, his wealth, his crowds – Donald Trump made something of a bold U-turn on Thursday night by addressing the country from a desk seemingly designed for a leprechaun.
Trump said on Thursday he would leave the White House if the electoral college votes for the Democratic president-elect, Joe Biden – the closest he has come to admitting defeat – but his furniture stole the limelight.
While he harangued reporters and repeated unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, the internet zeroed in on his unusually small desk. Some called it symbolic of Trump’s diminished stature, some wondered if it was photoshopped (it wasn’t), most just laughed.
The actor Mark Hamill tweeted: “Maybe if you behave yourself, stop lying to undermine a fair election & start thinking of what’s good for the country instead of whining about how unfairly you are treated, you’ll be invited to sit at the big boy’s table.”
The hashtag #DiaperDon swiftly trended on Twitter, with people mocking the president as an infant banished to the children’s table for Thanksgiving.
“Thought this pic was photoshopped, but nope, just hilariously symbolic! Mini desk. Tiny hands. Infinitesimally small soul,” tweeted Adam Lasnik.
Trump later sent a blizzard of tweets accusing the media of misreporting his comments and Twitter of making up “negative stuff” for its trending section.
The thing is that he is still the president and that press conference was one of the worst he’s ever held. It would be nice to simply ignore him except for the fact that at least 50 million people think he is telling the truth, maybe more. That’s a LOT of people.
Here it is in all its glory. Fox carried it live.
According to data from Ergonomics Center of North Carolina, the average American male’s hand is 7.61 inches long. Trump’s hand sits at the 15th percentile mark. That is, 85 percent of American men have larger hands than Trump. As do a third of women.
But bear in mind, that is the 15th percentile among all American men. Trump is tall – about 6-foot-3, half a foot taller than the 5-foot-9 average among American men, according to the Center for Disease Control. If Trump were compared to men of his stature rather than the public at large, his hands would comparatively be even smaller.