BODY LANGUAGE

Macron: Unusually Long Trump Handshake Was ‘Not Innocent’

Meant to show “we won’t make small concessions.”

After an unusually long handshake with U.S. President Trump earlier this week raised eyebrows, French President Emmanuel Macron has suggested the gesture was meant to make the American president uncomfortable. Calling his meeting with Trump before a NATO summit on Thursday a “moment of truth,” Macron said the handshake “was not innocent” in an interview with Journal du Dimanche published Sunday. “We need to show that we won’t make small concessions, even symbolic ones, while not overhyping things either,” he said. He went on to put Trump on par with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “Donald Trump, the Turkish president or the Russian president believe in the logic of the trial of strength, which doesn’t bother me. I don’t believe in the diplomacy of public invective, but in my bilateral dialogues, I don’t let anything pass, that is how we are respected,” he said.