President Donald Trump is raising eyebrows over the weird placement of his finger while shaking the hand of GOP Chair Joe Gruter’s wife.
The awkward hand grip was spotted in a photo carousel posted on Instagram Sunday by Gruters, the 80-year-old president’s hand-picked Republican National Committee chair, to celebrate his wife Sydney Gruters’s 45th birthday.
In the photo, Trump’s makeup-caked right hand wraps around hers, but instead of resting his index finger beneath her hand as it normally would in a handshake, he extends it past her wrist and presses it against the inside of her arm.
Sydney, a Florida congressional candidate in the midterms, looks up admiringly at Trump as he gazes down at her, apparently mid-sentence. The photo was taken at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Medinah, Illinois, a suburb northwest of Chicago, where Trump made an appearance on Sunday.
“Happy Birthday to @ssgruters! Please send her a note! We are spending her birthday with President @realdonaldtrump at the @presidentscup Go USA!” Gruters, who also serves as a Florida state senator, wrote in the caption.
Even though Gruters, 49, posted the carousel in honor of his wife’s birthday, Trump features in four of the five photos.
The president’s weird finger placement didn’t go unnoticed.
“What the hell kind of grip is that? Is he shaking her hand or taking her pulse?” one X user asked, while another commented, “What’s with the finger down the wrist thing.
Others suggested the photo might not sit well with Trump’s most loyal aide, Natalie Harp.
Amid mounting scrutiny over Harp’s proximity to the president and the nature of their relationship, the Daily Beast last month published, in full, two letters the 35-year-old wrote to the president. In one, she confessed she was “starting to envy those whose only ‘job’ seems to be to talk with you, and look pretty.”
Gruters restricted comments on the birthday tribute to his wife, unlike his other posts, which mostly feature him praising the increasingly unpopular president’s record.
He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Daily Beast has also reached out to Sydney’s campaign and the White House for comment.
The remaining photos in the birthday post include a shot of Sydney and Trump standing side by side with Trump flashing his signature thumbs-up, another showing the two talking animatedly, and one of Gruters and Sydney posing in front of a President’s Cup sign.
For Trump and Gruters, the golf course offers a temporary escape from the midterms disaster taking shape in front of them amid disastrous polling for the president and Republicans.
Asked why Republicans deserve to keep power in Washington in spite of Trump’s failed promises to ease inflation and bring down the price of gas on NewsNation last month, Gruters said “people have short memories” and blamed Joe Biden for Americans’ economic troubles.
