Nothing is too small for the Trump administration to lose their cool over, apparently. The team that’s been responsible for popularizing the spread of fake news allegations over stories they don’t like has been posting images to President Donald Trump’s social media accounts doctored to make him look fitter — and in at least a couple of cases, they’ve also apparently endeavored to make his fingers look longer.
The same image went up on Trump’s Instagram account more recently — and in both cases, when placed side by side with the original January 14 photo captured by a White House photographer, it’s clear that Trump’s right shoulder has been shrunk, the skin around his face has been tightened up — and, as mentioned, the index finger on his right hand, which he’s pointing with, has been made to look longer.
Check out the differences below.
This is what the Trump team is doing while hundreds of thousands of federal employees face continued hardship thanks to their lack of pay. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been among those to bring forward stories of affected individuals who can’t handle their basic living expenses and are facing hurdles like having to rely on food banks and possibly losing their homes.
That doesn’t even cover the many Americans who rely on government services that have been put on thin ice because Trump won’t approve any further funding without over $5 billion for a border wall. The food stamps program will run out of funding in what’s approaching one month unless something is done.
The White House has claimed that responsibility for the shutdown rests on the Democrats’ shoulders, despite the fact that the new Democratic House majority has put forward eight spending packages and counting while Trump has refused to acknowledge that maybe his border wall isn’t so needed.
He offered to extend protections for undocumented immigrants brought here as children and individuals living in the U.S. with Temporary Protected Status in exchange for wall funding — but to the surprise of very few, that offer to sort of clean up one mess he made in exchange for permission to make another didn’t get far. The Trump administration is the one who has been undercutting protections for undocumented immigrant “Dreamers” and TPS recipients in the first place.
If an observer wondered what the Trump team was doing behind the scenes to address these issues, it’s now clear — they’re making the president’s fingers look longer.
He has a well documented obsession with his physical appearance as part of his obsession with his public appearance overall. In 2015, journalist Graydon Carter said that “to this day” he received occasional images of the eventual president from Trump himself, who’d circled his hands in gold Sharpie in spite over Carter having mocked him as “short-fingered” decades ago.
The January example of the Trump team making Trump’s finger look longer isn’t alone. They did the same in an October 2018 example, and they undertook other edits to make him look thinner in a graphic posted in January of this year.
In other words… the guy who made sure people knew his fingers actually weren’t short before he became president is the same who’s in the White House now.