Did Trump 'flash his middle finger' at female astronaut for fact-checking him on spacewalk presentation?
President Donald Trump doesn’t like to be in a position or place where he may feel cornered or corrected. The Republican was accused of making his disappointment known last week after a woman astronaut corrected him on his facts and he supposedly 'flipped his middle finger' at her.
It so happened that Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and daughter and Senior Advisor Ivanka Trump at the White House last Friday (October 18), congratulated two women astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch as first women spacewalkers and called them "amazing people". To this, Meir, who was responding from the International Space Station (ISS), corrected the president saying other female spacewalkers have done it before and it was the first time that two women were doing it together. The first woman to do a spacewalk was the then Soviet Union’s Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya in 1984 and 14 more women have followed suit.
“We don't want to take too much credit because there have been many other female spacewalkers before. This is the first time that there's been two women outside at the same time,” Meir said during a conversation that went on for five minutes. Along with Koch, she was on an eight-hour spacewalk last week to repair a broken part of the ISS’ solar power network.
At this point, Trump was seen raising his right-hand middle finger and scratching his head awkwardly as camera lenses from the media covering the event zoomed in. The maverick president was accused of insulting NASA’s space heroes and that too in the presence of the space agency's representatives.
Trump has done this earlier as well
However, this is not the first time that Trump has been seen scratching his hair with the middle finger in an apparent gesture of disapproval.
In February 2017, just days after taking over the reins of the White House, Trump was seen scratching his head with the middle finger while sitting besides Omarosa Manigault, a former White House official who was once a big supporter of Trump but became one of his fiercest critics later, and Ben Carson.
The president was seen displaying a similar gesture during the G7 summit in Sicily, Italy, the same year, making it evident that he was not in tune with the club ever.