From the first handshake outside the White House, one body language expert says U.S. President Donald Trump clearly showed “a certain level of respect” for Prime Minister Mark Carney during their meeting today.
“Obviously, the risk always with a handshake with Trump, is he’s going to pull you off balance. We see that happening time and time again,” Mark Bowden told CTVNews.ca. “In this particular situation, he didn’t try and pull Carney off balance, which… would suggest that Trump sees Carney as quite a strong person, as somebody who should be respected.”
Bowden, a best-selling author, is the founder and president of Truthplane, a training company that specializes in verbal and nonverbal communication. He says that with the Canadian delegation likely looking to avoid a confrontation like the February clash between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, it’s notable that Carney was able to politely deflect the most contentious comments about Trump’s desire to turn Canada into the 51st U.S. state.
“I think Carney’s tactic there was to stay as deadpan and still as possible,” Bowden said. “He’ll often do lip purses, which is he’s kind of sucking his cheeks in a little bit… That we often associate with withheld opinion.”
If Carney could be criticized for one thing, Bowden says he could have done more to jump into the conversation. As Trump dominated the dialogue in the Oval Office, Carney was often left silently holding a finger in the air when he wanted to make a point.
“Now, probably in the boardrooms that he’s been used to, where he is the biggest person in charge, him just raising a finger causes everybody to look and they’ll stop and they will give him space,” Bowden said. “We saw at the debate, the English-speaking debate, his raising of the finger doesn’t get anybody to stop. His raising of a finger doesn’t get Trump to stop, so he’s got to create bigger regulator gestures so that he can get a word in.”
