Does Trump’s Bruised Hand Story Make Sense?

Summary

Bulwark Takes Podcast Summary

Episode: Does Trump’s Bruised Hand Story Make Sense?
Date: December 26, 2025
Hosts: Sam Stein and Jared Polin

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Episode Overview

In this lighthearted and investigative episode, hosts Sam Stein and Jared Polin tackle the curious story behind former President Donald Trump’s repeatedly bandaged and bruised hand. Drawing on a viral press briefing explanation—that Trump’s perpetual handshaking, coupled with a daily aspirin regimen, causes the bruising—the Bulwark team decides to test the theory themselves. Jared volunteers as the "experiment subject," shaking over three hundred hands outside the White House to see if his hand would bruise, as Trump’s reportedly does.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Bruised Hand" Press Narrative and Experiment Inspiration

• The origins: Caroline Levitt (Trump’s press secretary) explained Trump’s bruised hand as the result of frequent handshaking and aspirin use.
• Sam and Jared find this explanation “testable” and design a DIY experiment to see if it holds up.
• Sam Stein [01:53]:

  "And I had this idea in my head, well, that seems testable. Like, we can actually figure out... what it's like to shake a lot of hands and take aspirin, and we can decide based on the results if she's telling the truth or not."

2. Planning the Handshake Experiment

• Sam initially proposes shaking hands for 5-8 hours; Jared negotiates it down to a more reasonable 3 hours.
• Jared’s background in street canvassing (fundraising for ACLU) helps strategize maximizing handshakes.
• He creates a sign reading: "Please shake my hand. I have three hours to shake as many hands as possible."
• Strategically sets up by the White House during a Christmas party for higher "foot traffic."
• Jared Polin [04:20]:

  "I made a sign that said, please shake my hand. I have three hours to shake as many hands as possible. And I set that up beside me."

3. Jared’s Handshake Experience

• Recaps the variety of handshakers, from curious partygoers to a Boy Scout troop and repeat-shaking jokesters.
• The weather: Cold, around 40°F and dropping, adding discomfort to the experience.
• Hygiene: Keeps hand sanitizer nearby, which reassures participants.
• Jared Polin [05:51]:

  "It was cold. It was like 40 degrees out. I think at one point I was like, I can't feel my toes, Sam Stein... But, like, getting to meet people out in the street, just, like, having a conversation with them. It's not bad. Like, I enjoyed it."

4. The Scientific Test

• Jared records 315 handshakes in 3 hours on camera, with a few additional off-camera.
• Takes an aspirin beforehand to match Trump’s reported regimen.
• Video recap shows Jared soliciting handshakes, marking progress, and reporting on hand condition.
• Jared Polin [07:45]:

  "I bought some bare aspirin. I'm gonna take one, shake a bunch of hands, and we're gonna do a before and after and see if my hand gets bruised the same way his does."

5. The Results

• Soreness sets in post-experiment, but absolutely no bruising observed.
• Jared concedes differences in age and daily repetition could matter, but for a healthy adult, handshaking plus aspirin doesn’t create visible bruising in one sitting.
• Jared Polin [08:48]:

  "Yeah, in the hours after it started to hurt. But the next morning it was genuinely sore. No bruising."

• Both agree it's "plausible," not proven, and may depend on frequency, age, or other variables.

6. How Many Hands Does Trump Really Shake?

• Debate on realistic daily handshake counts for Trump: holiday party photo lines might mean hundreds, but day-to-day far fewer.
• Both reflect on Trump's well-known germaphobia.
• Sam Stein [09:38]:

  "What would you put a guess at for how many hands the guy shakes in the course of a day?... It's got to be less than 50 in just a normal day, not a rally."

7. Reflections on Gimmick Journalism

• Sam reminisces about having reporters try "living like Trump" for a story—ultimately nixed by a spooked reporter after consulting a nutritionist.
• Jared is open to future stunts:

  "Feel free. I'm down to try the crazy ideas." [12:36]

• Sam invites listeners to send in ideas for more social experiments, promising not to risk "serious physical harm."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Sam Stein [02:30]:

  "[The White House has] been pretty cagey, right? ...Caroline has kind of just beat around the bush on the question."

• Jared Polin [05:11]:

  "There was these two guys... and they asked if I could take multiple handshakes. ...So like 15 of the 315 we did were just these same guys."

• Jared Polin [07:00]:

  "315 on camera. There was a couple I got off camera..., but 315 on camera? Yeah."

• Jared Polin [09:26]:

  "I used to watch Mythbusters a lot growing up, and they would say it was plausible."

• Jared Polin [11:12]:

  "This is a great way to spend my Saturday... I had fun doing it, just getting to meet people, talk to them. It was a fun experiment."

• Sam Stein [12:40]:

  "If you have a good gimmick story idea for Jared to tackle, nothing crazy, we're not, we don't want to risk physical harm, maybe a little bit, but drop it in the comments, we'll take a look..."

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:13] — Introduction of Trump's Bruised Hand and Press Briefings
• [03:58] — Jared’s Handshake Strategy and Setup
• [05:11] — Funny interactions and responses from the public
• [07:12] — Start of compressed “handshake experiment” video recap
• [08:48] — Immediate and next-morning effects: soreness but no visible bruising
• [09:21] — Analysis: Could regular handshaking bruise a hand? “Plausible, not proven”
• [09:56] — Estimating how many hands Trump actually shakes
• [11:12] — Reflections on the experiment and willingness for future attempts
• [12:40] — Call for listener ideas for future gimmick-journalism projects

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a blend of skepticism, humor, and DIY journalism as Bulwark’s team probes a viral White House explanation. After a fun field test, the podcast finds little evidence to support the claim that a single day of heavy handshaking (even with aspirin) would visibly bruise a healthy adult’s hand, though frequent repetition for older individuals isn’t ruled out. The episode is anchored by playful banter, a hands-on approach, and an open invitation for future audience-inspired stunts.

Transcript

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[Jared Polin]

If.

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[Sam Stein]

Hey everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulk. I'm joined by Jared Polin, who is the guru of everything we do and all the good stuff that you see on your computer. That's him. He makes us look good. Jared, good to see you, buddy. How you doing?

[Jared Polin]

I'm doing good. Ready for the holidays?

[Sam Stein]

Oh yeah, yeah, me too. I'm sure it'll be slow. So look, we're going to do something fun for the viewers. Basically this was a stupid idea that I had and Jared, who is amenable and a good egg and who I sent all my dumb ideas to. He I don't know if you initially agreed to do it willingly or if I had to badge you. How many times I have to ask you? Three or four times?

[Jared Polin]

At least. Yeah.

[Sam Stein]

Okay, so this is the backstory. Donald Trump, as everyone now knows, has this weird thing going on with his hand and sometimes there's bandages there, sometimes it's just like a lot of makeup covering up and it's perplexed a lot of people, like, why is this. Why is this happening?

[Jared Polin]

What.

[Sam Stein]

What's going on? And the white has been a little bit cagey about it. I think that's fair to say. You watch all these briefings. They've been pretty cagey, right?

[Jared Polin]

Yeah. For the most part, Caroline has kind of just beat around the bush on the question. Like, she'll get asked about Trump's hand, and she pretty much always blames it on the handshakes on his aspirin intake.

[Sam Stein]

Yeah. Okay. So the other day, she was pretty explicit. She's like, look, he's shaking hands all the time, and he's on aspirin, and it's just causing incredible bruising. And I had this idea in my head, well, that seems testable. Like, we can. We can actually figure out, not maybe scientifically, but we can try to approximate to a degree what it's like to shake a lot of hands and take aspirin, and we can decide based on the results if she's telling the truth or not. And so the question was, how do you go about shaking a lot of hands? And so I said to Jared, I said, jared, why don't you go. Where did you go? To the front of the White House and just shake hands for. I initially said, like, five hours, maybe eight. And I think you looked at me a little bit in horror. And then I said, well, okay, how about three hours? And then we tried to figure out, how can we do this? And so Jared agreed to do it. But talk a little bit about how you agreed, how you figured out you could get the most amount of handshakes, then we'll play the video, and then we'll talk about the experience on the other side.

[Jared Polin]

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time street canvassing, asking people for money. I was fundraising for the ACLU back in the day, and.

[Sam Stein]

Oh, you were one of those people.

[Jared Polin]

I was one of those people, yeah. Right out of college. That's what I was doing.

[Sam Stein]

It's like, hey, sir, do you have a minute to spare? I want to talk to you about the. You know, the endangered animals or something. Yeah, okay.

[Jared Polin]

But I. I realized with the handshakes, it'd probably be a little bit easier than money. So what I did is I came into the office, I made a sign that said, please shake my hand. I have three hours to shake as many hands as possible. And I set that up beside me. And then as people walked by, I was like, please give me a handshake. I need to get as many as possible.

[Sam Stein]

Did people look at you weirdly?

[Jared Polin]

Some did. A lot of people thought it was like a fantasy football punishment if they asked. I explained to them the experiment we were doing. There's also a Christmas party going on at the White House at the time. So I was getting a lot of people coming out of the White House as I was out there, which was interesting.

[Sam Stein]

So maybe they had already. They just shaken Donald Trump's hand, and now they got yours. Okay. So it was actually much more scientific than we thought. The same type of handshakes. He was endearing. What was the most hilarious interaction you got?

[Jared Polin]

There was these two guys that were going, I think, to the John Cena's final match, and they asked if I could take multiple handshakes. And so basically they just kept shaking my hand over and over again. So like 15 of the 315 we.

[Sam Stein]

Did were just these one.

[Jared Polin]

Just these same guys. And they came back like, 20 minutes later and were like, one for the road. And were they drunk? Maybe. I mean, they were having a good day. They were maybe college age.

[Sam Stein]

Okay.

[Jared Polin]

So they were fun. There was a lot of kids who would just be asking me a lot of questions about it. There was a Boy Scout troop that came through, shook all their hands. It was a good time.

[Sam Stein]

Was it?

[Jared Polin]

I mean, it was cold. It was like 40 degrees out. I think at one point I was like, I can't feel my toes, Sam Stein. I cannot feel my toes, Sam Stein. Because it got cold. I was out there in the afternoon. It was 40, dropped down into the 30s, so it got cold. So that wasn't fun.

[Sam Stein]

But, like, there's some hazard pay here.

[Jared Polin]

Getting to meet people out in the street, just, like, having a conversation with them. It's not bad. Like, I enjoyed it.

[Sam Stein]

Did you bring Purell?

[Jared Polin]

Yes. I had a thing of hand sanitizer to the side. Gotta have the hand sanitizer. And people once they saw that were like, okay, I'll shake your hand. And they're like, can I use it? I'm like, yeah, that's why it's there.

[Sam Stein]

Did you apply it after every single.

[Jared Polin]

Oh, I applied. Yeah. Not after every single one, but, like, every five, 10 minutes, I just reach down, do a quick apply. But, yeah, I went to CVS beforehand and grabbed that just so I'd be prepared.

[Sam Stein]

Okay, fair enough. Well, I appreciate you doing this. I think we've teased it enough. Let's play the results. A compressed version of Jared's handshake experience. I know you say it in the video, but how many handshakes did you ultimately shake?

[Jared Polin]

315 on camera. There was a couple I got off camera where I was like setting stuff up, but the sign was still out, so I didn't get a number count on those, but 315 on camera? Yeah. Okay.

[Sam Stein]

All right, let's watch the experience.

[Jared Polin]

You may have noticed over the past couple of weeks that Donald Trump has this strange bruising on the back of his hand. During press conferences or meetings in the Oval Office, he's constantly covering it up. He's been spotted with bandages and various things on top of it. Caroline Levitt was asked about this during a press briefing, to which he said this.

[Commercial Narrator]

The President is literally constantly shaking hands. The Oval Office is like Grand Central Terminal. He is meeting with more people than any of you even know about on a daily basis. He's also on a daily aspirin regimen, which is something his physical examinations has said in the past as well, which can contribute to that bruising that you see.

[Jared Polin]

I bought some bare aspirin. I'm gonna take one, shake a bunch of hands, and we're gonna do a before and after and see if my hand gets bruised the same way his does. Excuse me. I love your costumes. Could I get a handshake? I'm testing to see if I shake a bunch of hands, if I get a lot of bruising. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All the hands count. I don't need that. There you go. So we're like an hour and a half in shaking a lot of hands. I'm going to keep going. Hands still not bruise though, so we'll see. In total, I shook 315 hands outside of the White House. And I will admit the next morning my hand was very sore. It didn't bruise. But I think it's worth considering that Donald Trump is a lot older than me and he does shake a lot of hands, so maybe there's something to it.

[Sam Stein]

All right, so there you have it. Now your hand hurt, I think that's fair to say.

[Jared Polin]

Yeah, in the hours after it started to hurt. But the next morning it was genuinely sore.

[Sam Stein]

Genuinely. So okay, no bruising. But this was just a one time experience. So you're not doing this day in, day out. And I don't know if Trump shaking 315 hands in a three hour period either. So there's like that. But I think you could probably, I don't know, you tell me. Could you imagine your hand kind of getting scuffed in a little bit, you know, bruised up if you were doing a version of that, you know, every day.

[Jared Polin]

Yeah, I think it is. I used to watch Mythbusters a lot growing up, and they would say it was plausible.

[Sam Stein]

Plausible.

[Jared Polin]

Yeah, plausible. Like, it's not proven that it's going to bruise my hand, but I think that if someone gives you a couple really hard handshakes, it could leave some bruising. Like, I do think that is a legitimate.

[Sam Stein]

Well, let's think here. How many hands do we think Trump is shaking a day? It's obvious. Not 315. There's no way. I mean, maybe during the holidays when he's got the procession line and all that stuff, but he's a bit of a germaphobe. We know that he doesn't like shaking hands. What would you put a guess at for how many hands the guy shakes in the course of a day?

[Jared Polin]

I mean, at a holiday party, I think, like, 315 is, like, a top number. Like, that's close to the max of what he's gonna shake. And I doubt.

[Sam Stein]

I don't know. There's hundreds of people at that holiday party. No, no, no.

[Jared Polin]

Yeah, but are they all getting a handshake? With Trump, he. Normally. There's, like, a hundred. Photo line.

[Sam Stein]

There's. Oh, maybe he doesn't do the photo line.

[Jared Polin]

The.

[Sam Stein]

When I. When I went to these holiday parties, when they actually invited the press to the parties, you all went in a photo line, and it was hundreds and hundreds of people. I haven't brought a relative, so it was a lot of handshakes. But that's just, like, seasonal. I think during the course of a year, I would guess he probably shakes, I don't know, 50 to 100 a day somewhere in that. If that's a good day. That seems like a lot, too. No, that even. No, no, that seems like a lot. It's got to be less than 50 and just a normal day, not a rally. He's not maybe 50.

[Jared Polin]

I imagine a normal day, it could be even less. Like, if he's not meeting people, like, new people, he's probably not shaking hands because he is a germaphobe. Like, he. He's not.

[Sam Stein]

He's not like, when.

[Jared Polin]

When.

[Sam Stein]

Like, you know, when Kennedy comes in to brief from her best, and he's not like, hey, buddy, what's up? You know, he's just like, sit down. Let's talk. All right. So plausible. Plausible. Are you glad you did this? I mean, this was an act of journalism, maybe heroism. I don't know.

[Jared Polin]

I would say, yeah, I'm Glad I did it. This is a great way to spend my Saturday. I was going to do it during the work day, but it was a busy day. So I was like, I'm going to take the Saturday afternoon, go out, shake some hands. And I had fun doing it, just getting to meet people, talk to them. It was a fun experiment. People laughed about it. So it's a good time.

[Sam Stein]

It's good to know because I, I don't know if you know this about me. I think you might have discovered this. I like gimmick journalism like this. So back in the day, I'm not going to name names, but I was working on a publication and a book came out. I think it might have been Sean Spicer or someone else, maybe Corey Lewandowski, where they revealed Trump's diet. And it was like a lot of McDonald's and eggs and bacon and steak and Diet Cokes and shitty snacks and, you know, those, like, horrific amount of calories that would be horrible for your cholesterol. And I went to one of my reporters, I said, look, I want you to live like Trump for a week, okay? Just eat on his diet for a week and just see how that feels. And this reporter was like into it. And then he looked into it a little bit more and then he actually emailed a nutritionist at the University of Columbia, or Columbia University, I should say. And the nutritionist wrote back, do you have a history of heart disease in your family? And it spooked the reporter out so much that he begged to not do it. And we never did the piece. But I like stories like that. And since you are game to do them, I'm coming back for you, okay?

[Jared Polin]

Feel free. I'm down to try the crazy ideas.

[Sam Stein]

All right, so, dear, dear viewers, if you have a good gimmick story idea for Jared to tackle, nothing crazy, we're not, we don't want to risk physical harm, maybe a little bit, but drop it in the comments, we'll take a look, we'll decide if it's worthwhile to do it. As of now, reward the man for doing all these handshakes by sharing this video and liking it. Pass it around and subscribe to the feed. Jared, buddy, thank you so much, man.

[Jared Polin]

Thank you.

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