Well that didn’t take long. Never to be outdone by his rival Elon Musk, who flashed a Heil Hitler salute a few weeks ago, Steve Bannon just gave his version, looking far more comfortable—as if he practiced in front of a mirror–than Musk with that rictus smirk twisting his face.
By David Breitkopf
Every day another democratic norm is crushed beneath Trump’s lifts, and even nearsighted Americans can make out the dictatorship at the end of the tunnel, so it’s time, the top MAGA visionaries deemed, to unveil symbolically the latent truth of the movement.
For a long time it was that weird hand sign—three extended fingers, and the thumb and index touching to form an “OK.” And it was somehow related to a frog? A bit esoteric and adolescent, certainly not the heroic gesture a dictator prefers basking in at rallies. The Sieg Heil salute, on the other hand, always gets journalists into a dither: did he, didn’t he? How dare he?
It’s well documented that Trump admires Hitler, quoting him (immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country”), but he’s been careful not to give the Hitler salute. And I don’t think he will for a simple reason: the Hitler salute goes against brand. It’s Hitler’s not Trump’s. Trump didn’t come up with it. He didn’t design those Red Hats to Make Germany Great Again.
That doesn’t mean Trump isn’t busy developing and crowd testing the right gesture, some grand salute that he will sell to his throng along with a commemorative coin.
But Trump has his hands full, so to speak. It’s going to be difficult to compete with the Sieg Heil, which admittedly is an heroic if grotesque gesture with the right arm jutting almost involuntarily to its fullest extent and upward, fingers reaching out in hopes of touching the Dear Leader. In those Nuremberg rallies when the crowd makes the salute in unison, it is truly a dreadful vision.
Nothing Trump has done gesture-wise compares. He has a few decent ones. “The Accordion”–hands facing each other and moving back and forth. It’s fine. It can be expansive at times, but more often it’s a small movement because the verbal point he’s making is insignificant or incoherent. Most importantly, though, it doesn’t move out towards him. Imagine a Trump rally where the crowd in unison makes The Accordion salute. It would look absurd, and Trump might think the crowd was mocking him.
There is his dance moves, that stiff weeble woble, a tight smirk beneath his nose, as if recalling some Studio 54 sexual assault, and of course his two hands milking a cow, or as Bill Maher likes to say, jacking off two guys.
A friend of mine, though, thinks there is one hand gesture that might do the trick for Trump, and I agree with him: the wrists crossed and presented as if handcuffed. What dictator could resist a gesture of abject subjugation to his malignant will?
David Breitkopf teaches English. He was writer and journalist who worked for a number of newspapers over the years, including The American Banker. His writer’s Web page is DavidBreitkopf.com
