2016: Not a Normal Campaign

Conversation analysis at the ‘middle region’ of public life: Greetings and the interactional construction of Donald Trump's political persona

“…Analyzing President Trump's handshakes with world leaders has become something of a sport, so we had two professionals do it" (Rogers 2017) in the New York Times. 1 While the demagogic rhetoric of the 2016 Trump campaign (Drury and Kuehl 2018) should not be understood as 'normal' (Hinck 2018) in any sense, the news media's fascination with the minutiae of politicians' handshakes and other gestures is hardly a new phenomenon (see, e.g., Streitmatter 1988). Manusov and Milstein (2005), for example, argue that news media reports of the 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat create two key interpretative frames (Gumperz 1982: 21) for the event, through which even tiny bodily movements were magnified in importance and treated as either a representation or a transformation of macro-political processes and issues.…”