You’ve got to hand it to Trump. The president may be a global joke but he has an uncanny knack of always making sure he has the last laugh. Today’s exercise in dandruff diplomacy vis-à-vis France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, being a shining example.

Macron is currently at the White House, a trip which marks Trump’s first state visit from a foreign leader. The pair have gotten together to discuss Iran and Syria and, also, it would appear, so that Trump can put Macron very firmly in his place.

“They’re all saying what a great relationship we have, and they’re actually correct,” Trump gushed to the camera as the pair posed for photos. “It’s not fake news. Finally, it’s not fake news. It’s a great honor, a great honor that you’re here, in fact I’ll get that little piece of dandruff, that little piece …” Trump said. He then made a very public show of brushing invisible dandruff off Macron’s shoulder. “We have to make him perfect. He is perfect.” Meanwhile, Macron grinned and appeared somewhat lost for words as he subjected himself to this humiliation.

One suspects Trump has been planning this power play for a while. While the pair may have a “great relationship”, Trump and Macron have also been jostling to prove to each other who is more dominant. This started last year, when Trump met Macron for the first and the pair shared a very awkward handshake; a White House pool reporter described it as being of “considerable intensity, their knuckles turning white and their jaws clenching and faces tightening”.

For a moment it looked like the handshake might go on and on until one of them exploded, but Trump eventually let go first. Macron was clearly very proud of himself for his stamina; he later told the the Journal du Dimanche newspaper: “My handshake with him – it wasn’t innocent … we must show that we will not make small concessions, even symbolic.”



Trump’s dandruff-flicking, it could be argued, also wasn’t innocent. It may have been a hilarious moment but it is also a product of Trump’s somewhat terrifying ideas about diplomacy. Back in the 1980s, Trump apparently lobbied the George HW Bush administration for a job leading nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union. Richard Burt, who actually had some experience in the whole diplomacy thing, ended up getting the job instead.

According to the New Yorker, Trump later bumped into Burt at a wedding and proceeded to tell the guy, who he didn’t know, all about how he would have handled negotiations with the Soviets. He’d have welcomed the delegation very warmly and made sure they were sitting very comfortably down at the table. Then, Trump apparently said, he would have got up, yelled “Fuck you!” and left.



Burt rather charitably told the New Yorker he thought there was a sort of theory behind this. “Trump loves the chaos … to mouth off and get people off balance,” he said. “He wants to destabilize them, get them out of their comfort zone, then try to dictate the terms. By doing that, he believes he can get the upper hand. It’s the triumph of technique over substance.”



It could also be possible, of course, that Trump has zero impulse control and says and does whatever pops into his mind. Nevertheless, even if there is no method to the man’s madness, it certainly gets people out of their comfort zone. For the sake of international stability, let’s just hope that Trump is satisfied with his little dandruff jibe and tonight’s official dinner doesn’t descend into a tweetstorm about the relative size of the two men’s buttons.

