There was a G7 summit happening. Leaders gathered in Évian-les-Bains to discuss Ukraine, the aftermath of the US-Iran conflict, the Strait of Hormuz, tariffs and the future of transatlantic alliances. These are not small topics. And yet, by the end of Monday’s arrival ceremony, the thing most people were watching was a handshake.
Specifically, Trump’s handshake with Brigitte Macron.
It lasted more than ten seconds, according to Newsweek’s reporting. That is several seconds longer than anyone needs to say hello. It is longer than some business deals take to close. Long enough that what began as a diplomatic greeting started looking, to the people watching the clip, like something rather different.
Trump takes her hand. Trump grips. Trump pumps. Trump keeps going. At one point she appears to try to pull away. He keeps going. She maintains the full diplomatic smile of a woman who has been to enough of these events to know that the cameras are pointing at her face. When he eventually lets go, some viewers thought she gave her hand a quick wipe. That part is open to interpretation. The ten seconds is not.
The handshake has been a Trump story for nearly a decade. His introduction to French diplomacy was the Brussels summit of 2017, where Emmanuel Macron turned up specifically prepared for the grip-and-pull routine and refused to be physically dominated. Macron later described that encounter as a “moment of truth” – a deliberate signal that he was not going to make even small concessions. Both men appeared to squeeze harder than any normal adult greeting required. The footage was widely shared. A diplomatic handshake had become a white-knuckle contest.
Since then, it has become part of the theatre. Trump leans in. Trump grips too long. Trump pulls. Trump pats. Trump does the thing where a basic social gesture stops being a social gesture and starts being a performance that would make a 1980s motivational speaker wince.
With Emmanuel Macron, at least, there is nine years of history. The French President knows the routine and usually arrives prepared.
Brigitte Macron was just standing beside her husband in a greeting line.
There is also a small irony in how Monday played out. Before the Brigitte clip started circulating, the early reports from the arrival were focused on Trump’s handshake with Emmanuel Macron, which was apparently notable for the opposite reason. The Daily Beast described it as a “limp handshake” – unusually low-energy for the man who treats every greeting like an arm wrestling qualifying round.
Then came Brigitte. Apparently the old habits returned.
Some viewers found it funny. Others found it uncomfortable. The more interesting reaction came from people who noted the gendered dimension of it – that when Trump does his grip-and-hold routine with male leaders, it tends to be read as political theatre, two people playing a game they both understand. With the French First Lady, who was not there to play any game at all, it read rather differently.
She handled it with more composure than most people watching at home would have managed. She smiled. She waited. She carried on. That patience is probably why the clip worked so well online – there was no drama, no scene, just a woman counting the seconds until a man let go of her hand at a diplomatic event.
The backdrop, of course, was considerably more serious. Trump had arrived in France with his own list of priorities – pushing his position on Ukraine, his approach to the Iran situation, his views on tariffs that have been causing friction with European allies. Macron had been trying to keep European concerns on the agenda and had reportedly been pushing for continued US support for Ukraine and European involvement in stabilising the Strait of Hormuz. These are the conversations G7 leaders are supposed to be having.
But Trump has a remarkable gift for making the serious backdrop compete with whatever strange physical theatre is happening in the foreground. A summit about war and trade and energy security, and the clip everyone shared was ten seconds of grip.
Here is just some of the reaction:
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Brigitte Macron did not look especially thrilled to be part of it. And the one lesson anyone attending a Trump summit should probably take away is to arrive with a plan for getting their hand back.
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