DONALD TRUMP DOESN’T have the friendliest relationship with the press these days – so it came as something of a surprise that he managed to raise a laugh with an apparently off-the-cuff remark at his press conference last week.
Taking questions from the press on the same day news of that controversial Russian ‘dirty dossier’ emerged – the President-elect told reporters the rumours mentioned in the file couldn’t be true as he was “very much a germaphobe”.
In case you accidentally left the parental control setting on last week when those (unverified) reports emerged, they alleged the Russians had secret recordings of him in compromising circumstances with sex workers in a hotel room in Moscow. To be a little more precise (stop reading here if you’re having your breakfast right now) the video allegedly showed him watching the women urinating on the bed.
“In those rooms, you have cameras in the strangest places, cameras that are so small with modern technology, you can’t see them and you won’t know,” Trump said last week.
Explaining that he was in Russia for the Miss Universe contest “which did very well” he remembered telling “many people” to “be careful, because you don’t want to see yourself on television”.
“I’m also very much of a germophobe, by the way,” he said. “Believe me.”
The remark was met with a smattering of laughter – but it’s likely, in this instance, he meant what he said. There have been multiple reports – some from Trump himself – of the businessman-turned-politician displaying germophobic tendencies over the years.
“One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands, and the more successful and famous one becomes the worse this terrible custom seems to get,” Trump wrote in his third book, 1997’s Art of the Comeback.
I happen to be a clean hands freak. I feel much better after I thoroughly wash my hands, which I do as much as possible.
It’s reported he doesn’t like to press the ground floor button in lifts, on the basis that it’s been touched by so many other people.
Former GOP rival Jeb Bush also seized on Trump’s apparent reluctance to press the flesh early in the primary campaign, the Washington Post reports, with the Bush team mocking the candidate who as a germaphobe ”when it comes to shaking hands”.
‘I hate em, hate em’
The term ‘germaphobe’ is generally taken to mean a person “with an extreme fear of germs and an obsession with cleanliness”. More severe forms of it can take the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder – but there are also (obviously) very sensible reasons to avoid germs, so it’s no major surprise that someone entering a political campaign might worry about all those thousands of outstretched hands.
Another well-known US billionaire, Howard Hughes, was reported to have developed a severe phobia of germs in his later years – so much so that he took to living as a recluse, wearing nothing and eating only in small amounts, in order to ward off disease.
Trump, evidently, managed to overcome his concerns about hand-shaking – but, by the sounds of it, he may have had to undergo some personal training to do so.
Journalist Matt Frei spent some time with Trump in New York when he was still weighing up a presidential run back in 2012. Speaking on his show on London radio station LBC last year, he said:
“I wanted to know from him about his obsession with germs, germophobia. And he said ‘Yes I hate germs, I hate em, hate em’. And I said well if you’re going to run for President, you’re going to have to shake people’s hands.
“He looked at me almost as if this kind of thought had never really occurred to him before and he said ‘Yes, I don’t like shaking people’s hands because I don’t want contagion’.
“And I thought well why don’t we practice and I held out my hand and we kind of both looked at my hand.
It looked more like a fin than a hand at the time, sort of hovering in mid-air. And we looked at it. I felt a bit stupid doing it actually, but I thought let’s just try this.
I said let’s practice and then he shook the hand, rather graciously, if reluctantly and and then I withdrew the hand and and we carried on our conversation.
In his new job, Trump will be expected to shake about 65,000 hands a year.
Then again, he’s no stranger to upending expectations.
How are you feeling about the Trump presidency? Concerned? Delighted? We’d like to hear our readers views – so if you’d like to drop us a quick mail please send it to daragh@thejournal.ie. Include your first name and your county, and we’ll publish some of the messages as part of our liveblog on the inauguration this afternoon.
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