About

Justin Trudeau's Handshake With Donald Trump is a photoshop meme based on a Reuters photograph of the United States President reaching out for a handshake with the Canadian Prime Minister during their summit at the White House in February 2017.

Origin

On February 13th, 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the White House for a first time face-to-face meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. During a photo op before the press members, Trump reached his hand out for a handshake and Trudeau reciprocated by shaking his hand while facing the camera. While the moment went unnoticed in video, a photograph taken by Reuters photographer Kevin Lamarque captured an awkward split-second of Trudeau seemingly gazing at Trump's hand, which made it seem as if the prime minister was contemplating on whether to shake his hand.

As many TV and internet news outlets broke their reports on the first face-to-face summit, the Reuters photograph instantly grabbed the attention of the readers, and by quarter after noon, a handful of people on Twitter^[2][3] had already started cracking jokes about the awkwardly timed photograph.

Spread

At 12:22 p.m., VICE Noisey editor Kim Kelly^[3] tweeted the photograph with the caption "Today, we are all Justin Trudeau," garnering more than 1,691 likes and 2,500 retweets in less than 12 hours.

At 12:29 p.m. (EST), Redditor Cleantoe submitted the photograph to the /r/PhotoshopBattles subreddit^[6] in a post titled "Canadian PM Justin Trudeau hesitating to shake Donald Trump's hand." Throughout the afternoon, dozens of Justin Trudeau's imagined monologues and photoshopped parodies, including jokes about Trump's "small hand ":/memes/trump-s-small-hand reputation, continued to crop up and spread on Twitter^[5] and Reddit^[6], which was subsequently picked up by various news outlets in virtually all English-speaking regions.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]}

Examples

Search Interest

External References