President Trump’s hands were an unusually consistent topic of discussion during his recent international trip, Trevor Noah observed on Tuesday night’s Daily Show. From already-iconic images—that orb photo, the multiple instances of apparent Melania swatting—to endless handshakes, much about the trip’s ostensible successes and undeniable failures could, ultimately, be whittled down to what our president did with his pair of tiny hands.
Noah also took time to recap Trump’s time abroad, highlighting his staggering hypocrisy in Saudi Arabia and his remark that “We just got back from the Middle East” delivered in Israel—which, as it happens, is part of the Middle East. Further, he appeared genuinely disturbed by Trump’s destabilizing NATO speech. “In one day, Trump may have done what Russia had been trying to do for 50 years,” he began: “Break the alliance between the United States and Europe, which would make it easier for Russia to extend its powers to places like the Ukraine.”
So, no, regardless of Trump’s tweets to the contrary, the trip ended up doing lasting damage and not a whole lot of immediate good. And as German leader Angela Merkel acknowledged a future without American leadership to her own country, Noah keyed into the real underlying factor behind her speech. As he quipped, channeling Merkel’s comments from last week, “All right, our fate is in our own hands—because his clearly ruin everything they touch.”
