Don Trump’s “Pinocchio” Gesture

We’ve all seen him do it, but what does it mean?

Image by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

Don Trump’s a quirky kind of guy.

He has an odd forward-leaning stance, dances with his shoes nailed to the floor, confuses shaking hands with arm wrestling, and has a tendency to lurch into unparseable forays of avant garde English.

And then, there are his hands. BBC actually ran an analysis of Trump’s most frequent gestures early in his presidency:

Around that same time, Bloomberg catalogued an array of Trump’s deictic (pointing) and iconic/metaphoric gestures (those used to represent something the speaker is talking about) occurring at a single rally in Buffalo:

Several commenters to these videos, however, noted the conspicuous absence of one go-to maneuver, the “cymbal monkey” or…