Glancing at the BBC News app, I started reading an article about President Trump's first Executive Orders, and there was a picture of him signing one of these Orders.
He was using a big marker pen, so the signature would naturally be big also. Even so, that's a very striking signature. Was it his normal signature? I looked him up on Wikipedia, which often shows the typical signature of well-known people:
It is indeed his normal signature. I wonder what it says about him? For me, these words come to mind at once: wilful, aggressive, impatient, intimidating, uncompromising, ruthless, vindictive, relentless. It's the signature of a man who wants to appear overwhelmingly vigorous and strong - and a formidable and dangerous person to mess with.
I am not applying any tests drawn from 'graphology', a thing once taken seriously but now rightly discredited as a way to assess character or 'true personality'. Rather, I'm considering the highly-controlled hand-movements President Trump would have to make in order to write like this. It would be a series of stabbing thrusts, some short, some long, without any softening curves or artistic twiddles, and no meanderings or trailing lines. Certainly, it's the signature of a man who can hold a pen firmly, and is not the vague scrawl of a weak and feeble hand. To compare, I looked up Ex-President Biden's typical signature on Wikipedia, and I think it does reveal him to be a tired old man:
Perhaps the thing President Trump most wants to convey, with the way he signs things, is that he's still a force, and not a man who is being pulled down by old age, as Ex-President Biden clearly was. I am sure he must be afraid of encroaching senility, fearful of what will happen when he begins to lose his grasp of events, and with it his grip on power. He'll be seventy-nine in June. Once eighty, damaging comparisons with 'Sleepy Joe Biden' are bound to be made, and younger contenders will sense weakness, and start to position themselves. So he hasn't really got all that long to make his mark: maybe only a year and a half to achieve a lasting legacy. Meanwhile, he needs to employ every trick he can to convince his followers that he is robustly in charge, and remains a man to reckon with. So even signatures matter.
I wonder if he consciously and deliberately developed this very sharp, spiky signature for business situations, and then after that, adopted it for his political career, where a particularly 'strong' signature would be an impressive asset.
Does he employ it in all circumstances? Imagine receiving a Christmas or birthday card from him, signed in this way. Or a love-letter! I know what I would think.
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