This July 4, he posed, fist aloft, in front of Mount Rushmore before denouncing “far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance,” a rhetorical denial of his own anti-democratic instincts that a historian noted “echoed a classic technique of past fascist leaders.”
It signaled not a transition but a power grab. Trump’s presidency opened with the image of him raising his clenched fist at the end of his inaugural speech, in which he’d embraced the nativist slogan “America First” and called for “total allegiance” to the nation. But when it’s frozen in photographs, the fist hardens into a defiant, menacing embodiment of authoritarian swagger. It often makes Trump look like a duck-faced doofus, like when he did a double-fisted pump in the cab of a big rig or on his way to a 9/11 commemoration. In the moment, it can come off as a cheesy throwaway move. The Trump fist pump is the visual punctuation mark of his presidency, dropped during arrivals and departures, at the kickoff of a speech or in the afterglow of a rally, even in a Christmas message. He stopped, raised his right hand in a fist and shook it a few times in a motion that combined a pumped-up “rock on” and a jerking-off “whatever.” The gesture instantly conveyed that humility would not be a lasting effect of Trump’s run-in with the disease that he’d downplayed even as it had killed more than 200,000 Americans to date. On October 5, President Donald Trump lumbered out of the doors of Walter Reed Medical Center, three days after he’d been checked in with a case of COVID-19.
#Power to the people fist free#
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