Power

The strange, brief history of Trump’s trademark thumbs up

It seems like he’s been flashing the gesture forever. But he hasn’t.
Power

The strange, brief history of Trump’s trademark thumbs up

It seems like he’s been flashing the gesture forever. But he hasn’t.

Ryan Cunningham May—31—2018 02:36PM EST

Nary a photo opportunity goes by without the 45th president grinning bigly and sticking out his signature digit. He’s appeared flashing a mighty thumbs up with leaders the world over, including Japanese Prime Minister (and golfing buddy) Shinzo Abe, French President (and nuclear-capable bestie) Emmanuel Macron, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as a number of prominent Trump administration officials and members of Congress. Just this week, Trump gave a thumb of approval to youth sports programs, despite his professed belief that human beings are like batteries and that exercising too much depletes the body’s energy.

The phenomenon is hardly lost on observers. A writer in London’s Evening Standard called the gesture the President’s “trademark,” as indelible to Trump’s personal brand as “his oversized ties and wispy comb-over.” Comedian Jimmy Kimmel recently suggested that Trump has been peer-pressuring others into thumbs-upping in photos, and offered a theory for why Trump shows his thumbs so often: “The reason he does it is the thumb is the only normal-sized finger on his hand.”

Like the OK sign — another Trump favorite — the thumbs up is one of the most ubiquitous hand gestures in the world, evolving from a gesture of mortal judgment in Roman times to a fairly universal expression of approval, optimism, and “acceptable cinema option.” Just about every modern president (and presidential hopeful) has flashed one from time to time, including Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and even Barack Obama. A simple, pithy symbol of positivity and reassurance, it’s a fittingly presidential gesture. But something about Trump using it feels especially jarring and bizarre, probably because most of the time, he comes off as an angry lunatic.

What’s more, Trump is so thumb-happy that the notion of proper deployment in appropriate contexts seems to elude him. For example, the president took considerable heat this past February for repeatedly flashing the gesture and smiling while visiting Parkland, Florida, just days after a mass shooting there at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And early on in his presidency, Trump couldn’t help but put his thumb out in Saudi Arabia despite his own State Department advising against doing just that. (Though many people pointed out that the gesture is not as offensive in Saudi Arabia as the U.S. embassy in Riyadh claimed it was.)

At this point, it feels like Trump’s been putting up thumbs for decades, but the prolific photographic documentation of the celebrity dealmaker’s public appearances tells a different story. When I went looking for early evidence of the Trump thumb, I was shocked to find almost no photos of Trump showing off his “trademark” thumbs up. How is it possible that this man, who so frequently and so cheerily uses a thumbs up, was almost never photographed using the hand signal up until now?

In a not-so-scientific attempt to confirm my findings, I browsed over 9,000 Donald Trump images on an online celebrity photo library called ImageCollect to determine when the thumbs up was added to Trump’s repertoire of gestures. The Trump images go back as far as the 1980s, but none showed Trump giving a thumbs up until 2004, when he hammed for the cameras with a contestant from his infamous reality TV show, The Apprentice. Just as telling are all the public appearances where you’d expect Trump to do a thumbs up, but he didn’t, like this celebrity-laden Friars Club Roast in 2004, or Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame dedication ceremony in 2007 — which, let’s be honest, was probably the best fucking day of his life.

It wasn’t till around 2010 or 2011 when Trump’s shy thumbs starting peeking out of his tiny fists with some regularity. After that, as you can see in the above graph, Trump’s thumbs-up usage exploded in frequency, eventually becoming the emblematic gesticulation it is today.

So what happened? If I may offer my own speculation, 2010 to 2011 is roughly when Trump started becoming a fierce Obama critic and embracing the racist “birther” movement; it also coincides with Seth Meyers and Obama himself ripping him a new one at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Perhaps Trump started to reimagine his public persona around that time, transitioning from his self-perception as smoldering billionaire ladies man to serious political president guy. One might recall that Trump was openly flirting with the possibility of running for president back then, before announcing in May of 2011 that he would not run — at least not in 2012. Later, once we hit the 2015-2016 campaign season, the graph spikes again.

The Trump thumb is indeed very Trumpian, but don’t be deceived: it’s a relatively recent invention, and it’s likely little more than a conscious pantomime of previous president’s mannerisms by a man all dressed up in the president’s clothes. And nothing looks more presidential than persistently and enthusiastically brandishing the thumbs up.

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