Donald Trump once famously bragged that there was “no problem” with his hands, but one of his Democratic rivals isn’t so sure that’s true anymore.
The president on Tuesday took a shot at California Gov. Gavin Newsom during a three-hour-plus cabinet meeting, remarking that the telegenic Democrat — for years talked about as a potential presidential candidate — is “nice guy, good-looking” but “has some hand action going on.”
“There’s something going on there,” Trump added of Newsom’s hands.
The bizarre remark appeared to be an allusion to attacks leveled at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during last year’s presidential campaign. After the genial Gopher State executive was tapped as then-vice president Kamala Harris’ running mate, Trump’s campaign and many of his allies used video of Walz waving and gesturing during public appearances to falsely imply that he was secretly gay.
But Newsom, who in recent weeks has been aggressively using social media to mock and attack the president, hit back on X with a simple question: “You really want to have the conversation about hands?”
The remark could be a callback to a couple of Trump issues involving his hands — one tied to recent health concerns and another over their size, first raised by a then-rival on the 2016 campaign trail.
During the 2016 Republican primary Trump got into a debate stage argument with then-Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — now his secretary of state — over the respective sizes of their hands (a metric often used in popular culture as an indicator of a male’s physical endowment) with Trump telling the Floridian: “I guarantee you there’s no problem” after Rubio implied that Trump had diminutive hands.
But Newsom’s timely clap-back also alluded to recent speculation over the condition of Trump’s hands stemming from a series of appearances during which the president showed either visible bruising or heavy, poorly-applied makeup that was attempting to cover the large black-and-blue marks on his right hand.
The dark marks have been visible on his hands since last summer, at which point then-campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt — now White House press secretary — said they were the result of Trump “constantly working and shaking hands all day, every day” amidst the rigors of a presidential run.
But last month, after reporters pressed Leavitt about both the bruising and a series of photographs showing Trump’s ankles to be very swollen, she released a memorandum from Physician to the President Dr. Sean Barbabella that attributed the “minor bruising on the back of his hand” to “minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin,” a pain reliever and blood thinner that is often taken as a preventative.
Barbabella, a U.S. Navy physician who holds the rank of Captain, also said Trump’s swollen legs were a result of “chronic venous insufficiency,” which he called a “benign and common condition” for someone at the age of the 79-year-old former real estate developer.
Yet that explanation hasn’t stopped liberal commentators from suggesting more is afoot.
On Tuesday, YouTuber Keith Edwards — a former staffer for the anti-Trump Lincoln Project — posted a side-by-side comparison of Trump’s hand during a Monday event and the hand of the late Queen Elizabeth II during an audience with then-prime minister Liz Truss.
Edwards noted that the photograph of the late Queen with Truss was taken just two days before she passed, ending more than 70 years on the British throne.
