Let’s talk about this image of the Trump team (with Lewandowski in the front giving finger guns to the press):
Click to enlarge, darlings.
They’re rumpled. They look like a team of mobsters. Everything about their decorum says they don’t have any.
The men’s suits don’t fit. Omarosa Manigault’s dress is a ruched mess and even if she is pregnant, as rumors suggest, there is no excuse to show up at an event honoring veterans in that kind of unstructured party dress. Sorry, O, the red shoes and blue dress patriotism colors don’t excuse your disrespectful attire.
The men are equally disrespectful with wrinkles and untucked shirts and ties flying way down from where they should be. Just because your boss wears his tie way too low doesn’t mean you should play follow-the-dumb-leader.
Bunch of thugs.
You wonder why PeaceBang is always harping on crisp, ironed, good posture and protocol? This is why. Don’t you dare roll up anywhere looking like this. It screams, “I don’t care and I don’t need to respect you, my role, or this moment.”
TSK, TSK.
Compare and contrast:
But since we’re looking at rumpled messes, let’s reach across the aisle. Here’s an image from the Obama era.
This is why I try not to be photographed from a seated position. It’s a natural rumplizer, and no one needs that for a formal photo. Hells bells, no one needs that for an INformal photo!
Anyone in the public eye, whether a politician, author, television host, or minister (!) should learn one very basic rule: don’t point at people, whether making a “finger gun” (how utterly thuggish, vulgar, and childish) or wagging that finger (which is something one shouldn’t do even to a misbehaving child). The anthropologist James T. Hall discussed this kind of body language in his excellent book The Dance of Life.