Dear Readers,
Today we have a special one-off article to celebrate a collaboration between The Fence and Bungalow.
Bungalow publishes one series of stories per quarter, on something overlooked or just interesting (an uplifting tale about a suicide bomber, the evil of penguins and working in the NHS, for example) and lots of fun stuff in between. Today, we publish a story with them that settles a long-standing controversy and might even save democracy. TF readers who subscribe here get three months free.
Written by Bungalow’s founder, Ravi Somaiya, this piece asks and answers the question: does the President of the United States really have short fingers?
On page 45 of the April 1988 issue of Spy magazine, there’s a satirical advertisement for Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal.
It picks the worst quotes from reviews of the book. ‘Exercise in self-congratulation.’ ‘Repulsive book.’ It jokes that Trump has been buying copies of it himself.
Right at the bottom of the ad is a throwaway line that has resonated throughout the years. In fake promo copy it boasts that the book is ‘by Short-Fingered Vulgarian Donald J. Trump.’ It was authored by the magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, who had an instinct that the line would irk its subject. He was right. As recently as Trump’s first presidential run, Carter wrote:
‘To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him – generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them, he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.’
The insult resonates, partly because Trump’s hands are weirdly compelling, and partly because, like all the best derision, it’s a bit unsettling.
There’s a whole pseudoscience around finger lengths, in which some apparently quite clever and qualified people posit that because genetics, and hormones in gestation, dictate the ratio between those lengths, it can also indicate certain personality traits.
The only other person I’ve seen use the insult, and to some extent explain its resonance, is Orson Welles, as cited in Henry Jaglom’s wonderful book, My Lunches With Orson:
‘Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. If I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.’
Jaglom replied that that was ridiculous. Welles responded: ‘Measure them. Measure them!”’
At first, the suggestion that Jaglom abandon lunch, get a ruler and ask whatever Bosnians and Sardinians he could locate to hold still struck me merely as a wonderful piece of conversational egomania. But then I realised Orson was pointing the way for me to fulfil a long-held ambition: to measure Trump’s fingers and settle the argument between him and Graydon Carter once and for all.
Welles was just waiting for open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques that can draw measurements from images with great accuracy. Specifically, photogrammetry – the art or science of using photographs to glean precise measurements.
It’s used in forensic journalism to identify who shot which missile at whom, among other things. I consulted an expert, Barry Basnett, who said that it is also used to measure cracks in nuclear reactors or on weird parts of bridges, where people cannot go, or to help with crime scene analyses.
He told me that it can be incredibly accurate under the right circumstances. Enough to stand up in court, or to enable engineers to tackle complex problems. Certainly accurate enough to adjudicate a decades-old battle over an insult.
To me, there’s a moral impetus to do so. The true horror of Trump is that he turns those who fixate on him into versions of him – willing to warp the facts to achieve some idiotically petty end. If we can settle this scientifically, perhaps it will restore the notion that there is such a thing as reality, and that it’s not just all political debate.
I started by establishing a baseline. It turns out that people measure the finger lengths of other people en masse for all sorts of reasons. Prosthetics, robotics, the pseudoscience mentioned above. So there’s data. They all measure from the crease at the bottom of the finger, to the top.
There are, of course, a lot of variables. Fingers vary in length between hands. Finding the exact midpoint of your finger crease will cause you to philosophically wrestle with the limits of science. And total hand length is closely correlated with height. Trump is 6 feet 2½ inches, and I am confident of this because I stood next to him at a bar once and noted that we were exactly the same height.
Anyway, I averaged out all the academic studies I could find for the hands of men about Trump’s height, and did some measuring, and came up with the following numbers for men over 6 feet. Shorter than these is, for our purposes, short-fingered.
Thumb: 66.7mm
Index finger: 75.2mm
Middle finger: 82.1mm
Ring finger: 77.3mm
Little finger: 63.7mm
Now all I had to do was measure Trump’s hands. The most accurate form of photogrammetry, according to Basnett, involves a special rig with two cameras that are a fixed distance apart, on a pole of fixed height. Because the software knows those fixed distances, it can calculate other lengths and distances accordingly. I’d just have to build one (not hard) and get close enough to the President to use it (very hard). I am bearded, and Ugandan Indian. But in practice, I’m more Arabic or Pakistani-looking. Wielding a suspicious rig at a public event in the America of 2026 did not seem like a good idea.
The alternative is to find objects of fixed size in existing images, and use those to find other lengths either by building what is effectively a 3D model or using a calculation known as pixel height. The latter measures how many pixels make up a length you assign on the image. It can then extrapolate from that to figure out the length of something else in the same image.
I then looked at maybe 500 images of Trump’s hands to see if any would work. By the end of it, I was thoroughly unsettled. When he’s not gesturing, they hang from his sleeves like crepe rubber gloves filled with yoghurt.
It was hard for me to shake hands with anyone for a day or two afterwards. But I did learn, joyously, that Trump is often pictured holding sheets of paper in US letter size, or Sharpies, which are a standard length, at his desk. The nature of putting your hand on paper on a desk means that 1) the paper is flat, 2) so are the subject’s hands and 3) both are as close to being in the same geometric plane as possible. This meant I could get a pretty solid pixel height measurement for each of his fingers.
It was painstaking work. Frustrating work. I came home, and told my wife about it, and she casually told me that Trump had once given a handprint to Madame Tussauds, and that I could see and measure it just a few blocks from the Bungalow office. This was both welcome information, and tragically deflating, to the extent that I had a small lie-down. Especially because when I searched, I found I didn’t even have to walk the 15 minutes to measure the print. There was a perfect replica of his hand available online, had I thought to look.
But! But! Nobody had used it to specifically address the issue of finger length. And maybe fingers shrink with time or something. So here (as averaged from both photogrammetrical analysis of his fingers as pictured contemporaneously, and measurements taken from a handprint he gave in 1998), are the official finger lengths for the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald John Trump:
Thumb: 53.3mm — 13.4mm shorter
Index finger: 65mm — 10.2mm shorter
Middle finger: 76.5mm — 17.1mm shorter
Ring finger: 65mm — 12.3mm shorter
Little finger: 54mm — 9.7mm shorter
When I did this calculation, I became alarmed, and also felt oddly sorry for Trump. He’ll never play the harp, or do sleight-of-hand magic as well as he might.
But for the first time ever, we can officially say that Trump is short-fingered, and Graydon was right, at least as far as this analysis goes. I consider this a victory for truth, justice and Canada.
We hope you enjoyed that, and a reminder that you can sign up for Bungalow, for free, here. It really is excellent. We’ll be back with a conventional Off The Fence next Tuesday.
All the best,
TF