Jim Bunny Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

It was a bit of shameless name-dropping. Journos are good at it. We can be wanker-ish.

'When I was talking to Jacinda...” Or: 'When I was taking tea with the Commissioners...” Or: 'That's not what Kane Williamson told me...”

Nothing to do with facts and fairness, the caveats of our trade, but everything to do with one-upmanship, or wanker-ishness.

So when a colleague dropped a couple of very ‘B' or ‘C-lister' names into a conversation recently, I thought it time to trump them with my trump card – literally. 'Well, I met Donald Trump...”

That gazumped him. I would rather have met a luminary like Volodymyr Zelensky, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, JFK or Luteru Ross Poutoa Lote Taylor. But I haven't – just the orange man, just Donald J. Trump. 'Really?” asked Taylor Rice – a charming and enterprising young reporter on our team.

'So you have shaken hands with the Donald – yeah?”

Taylor isn't in awe of Trump but figured my encounter was impressive because, love him or loathe him, the Don is, or was, something of a global figure. Personally I don't love, I loathe.

I find him to be a misogynistic, lying, bullying, narcissistic, all round shady scuzzbag who neutered the Paris Climate Agreement and tried to scuttle NATO. And this after giving his big business buddies massive tax breaks and bragging about it. Nice!

'Wow,” said Taylor again, a few minutes later – his needle had stuck.

One final outing

And his curiosity excited. So when the January 6 Committee recommended criminal charges against Donald Trump, I got thinking this hoary old story should be given one final outing. After all, ‘the orange man' WAS the world's most powerful man… it was his pudgy finger on the red button until he lost an election, until he fomented an insurrection, until he lied about a ‘stolen election', until he got clobbered by the committee.

At his place

I met the man at his place, on the 26th floor of the sickeningly ostentatious Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan in 2002. There I shook the hand that would shake Vladimir Putin's hand.

I shook the hand that would shake Kim Jong-un's hand. I shook the hand that would shake hands with Xi Jinping. Yes, warmongers, autocrats and short chunky rocket men would all shake hands with the hand that shook the hand of Jim Bunny.

So, how did I inveigle my way into Donald J's? Well in a previous incarnation I was a current affairs producer – an industry name for a factotum, a dog's body. A good gig nonetheless ‘cos that trip took me to New York, San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay where the USA had incarcerated anyone who had uttered Osama bin Laden or Al-Qaeda and wore a kaffiyeh. They were looking for anyone to blame for 9/11. And it got me, us, an interview with the business magnate who at that stage was pre-‘The Apprentice' and pre-The Oval Office. He agreed to give us his impressions of 9/11.

And why? I suspect because he enjoyed the attention of a TV crew from the other side of the world.

His office is a shrine – wall-to-wall sporting memorabilia. Muhammad Ali's gloves from the 'rumble in the jungle”, Shaquille O'Neal's huge basketball boots, Wayne Gretzky's hockey stick.

He idolised, and now in this moment, in his mind, it was him as being idolised. Pffft!

And wouldn't you believe it – he told us he was upstairs watching TV when the terrorists struck the World Trade Centre. Twenty-one years later he would be watching TV again, this time in the White House dining room as his rabble stormed the Capital and tried to hijack democracy.

Large window

There's a large window in Trump's office that frames a spectacular view all the way down 5th Avenue to the Empire State Building and the World Trade Centre. Trump told us he'd been looking out that window for many years and now it was a 'weird feeling” not seeing the WTC anymore. In the documentary we said Trump the powerful American businessman was left powerless like everyone else in New York that day.

I remember he also likened the attack on the WTC to the WW2 attack on Pearl Harbour.

But the WTC was worse, he thought, because New Yorkers were defenceless.

Trump was courteous and magnanimous – we schmoozed, he schmoozed. He got some attention and we got our celeb interview. I do remember the hands only because my father always said you could judge a man by his handshake and the state of his shoes – which is irrelevant in this case, because there was no chance of Trump scuffing his $10,000 Louis Vuitton Richelieu's on the plush carpet on the 26th storey.

Big, cool, clammy palms and short fingers – sausages, and more London Pride pork sausages than chipolatas.

A handshake

Let's not forget the power of a handshake. A couple of years ago I was at Te Wharekura o Mauao – a very impressive tikanga Maori college in Bethlehem. Mark Gilbert, the US Ambassador and good buddy of President Barack Obama, was visiting the college and idly swapping stories with some of the kids. Gilbert was telling them, how after dinner, he and Obama would shoot hoops.

That resonated. And one curious kid figured if Gilbert and Obama were that close they must have shaken hands. When Gilbert confirmed, the kid raced up and shook hands with the hand that had shaken the famous hand. A bit of reflected glory. I've dined out on a handshake for years.

A bet that kid is doing the same.

Disclaimer: The other members of my current affairs team abroad might have quite different recollections and impressions of the encounter with Donald J. Trump.

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The ancient social gesture of handshaking has so captivated paleoanthropologist and evolu­tionary biologist, Ella Al-Shamahi, that she's written a book about it - ‘The Handshake - A gripping history.' Source: https://www.rnz.co.nz