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When Keir Starmer met Donald Trump in the White House for Thursday’s high-stakes meeting over the future of US-UK relations, the messaging each projected wasn’t confined to words alone.
From the power of the handshakes, to their tender gestures during the televised Oval Office chat, and the way each stood apart during the later White House press conference, the pair could not be more “mismatched”, according to body language expert Caroline Goyder.
“Trump is the silverback, totally relaxed, totally grounded, you know, on his home turf. And the difference, it couldn’t be starker,” Ms Goyder told ITV on Thursday night after viewing footage of the US and UK leaders as they prepared to discuss advances in security and trade.
“Whatever you think about Donald Trump, he is Mr Charisma with Mr Logic… Mr Legal. And so it’s amazing, It’s like Mars and Venus.”
Ms Goyder said Trump appeared “totally comfortable in his leadership” while Mr Starmer, when arriving at the White House to shake hands with the president looked like a “boy in his new school uniform, at school on the first day”.
She added that Mr Starmer appeared stiff and “held in that moment” and could be seen pulling his sleeves down.
Later, during the pair’s conversation in the Oval Office, Starmer slightly touched his stomach, which Ms Goyder described as “self-soothing”.
“And I can’t blame him, if I’m totally honest, because the pressure of this political historical moment on him is huge, even if the special relationship is not what it was, but you could see the pressure of that in how held his body language was,” she said.
Trump dominated the televised proceedings in the room, and at one point mocked Sir Keir, asking if the UK could take on the Russians “on your own?”
However, the prime minister was also able to interject when Trump asserted European nations would be getting their money back from the Ukraine war while the US would not.
The PM said: “We’re not getting all of ours. Quite a bit of ours was gifted, it was given, there were some loans, but mainly it was gifted, actually”.
But Ms Goyder said the comparison between Sir Keir’s body language and French president Emmanuel Macron’s during his earlier meeting with the US president couldn’t be starker.
She said Mr Macron, who was physically playful with Trump during their meeting, was also a very charismatic person and was able to engage with Trump on that level.
“Sir Keir needs to meet Trump on a more intuitive, passionate, instinctive level, and he needs to get into his body,” Ms Goyder told ITV.
“He needs to be more physically engaged, because that will give him a different kind of presence, a more powerful presence in a room with someone like Trump, who is all about charisma.”
