Donald Trump lashed out at Gavin Newsom Tuesday, mimicking the California governor’s mannerisms and calling out his “strange hand action.”
Trump used Tuesday’s cabinet meeting to lambast the Democratic governor, who has emerged as a persistent irritant for the administration.
“You have an incompetent governor in... California!” he said. “Gavin. I know him very well. He’s incompetent.”
The looks-obsessed president then conceded, “He’s a nice guy, looks good,” before attempting to copy Newsom’s mannerisms. That apparently reminded him of something he’d observed while studying Newsom’s body.
“He’s got some strange hand action going on, I don’t know what the hell his problem is,” he said, gesturing wildly with his hands.
The 79-year-old president, who has been dogged by questions about his health for months, appeared to be trying to spark health rumors about Newsom, 57.
“It’s a little weird, to be honest. There’s a little something shaky going on there,” he continued.
The dig prompted a swift and trolling response from Newsom, who has spent the summer upping his social media attack game aimed at rattling the president and his allies.
“You really want to have the conversation about hands?” the governor responded on X.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Trump has been seen with a dark bruise on the back of his right hand for over half a year, and has often attempted to conceal it with makeup.
He tried and failed to keep the mark out of view at Tuesday’s cabinet meeting by keeping his hands tucked under the table.
The enduring bruise has triggered concerns about his health, though the White House attributes it to constant handshaking and the use of aspirin, which it says Trump is taking “as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen.”
On Tuesday, the White House used disgraced doctor Ronny Jackson, Trump’s first White House physician and now a MAGA congressman, to vouch for the president’s health.
Jackson, who has given up his full medical license and was stripped of his military rank after a series of scandals, called Trump “the healthiest president this nation has ever seen.”
Newsom’s comeback could also allude to the long-running joke about the size of Trump’s hands, supposedly sparked by Spy magazine’s moniker for him—“short-fingered vulgarian”—in the 1980s.
The phrase has haunted Trump ever since, prompting him to insist to the Washington Post’s editorial board in 2016, “My hands are normal hands.”
Even Marco Rubio—now Trump’s secretary of state—mocked his hands while running against him during the 2016 Republican primaries, joking, “You know what they say about guys with small hands.”
