By Roger J. Kreuz
As former President Donald Trump exited the building where he had been found guilty of 34 felonies on May 30, 2024, he waved and raised a clenched fist to those who had gathered outside.
He had made the same gesture when surrendering to New York authorities after his indictment in the case in April 2023. And at the end of a June 2024 campaign stop at a church in Detroit, he stood in front of an illuminated cross and two American flags and raised his fist again.
I’m a cognitive scientist who studies communication and writes about the meaning of gestures and how they are interpreted.
The raised fist is one of the most interesting of these because of its long and varied history: It’s been used by fascists, socialists, communists, Black Power advocates and even golfer Tiger Woods.
Will the world see that same gesture as Trump formally clinches the GOP nomination at the party’s Milwaukee convention? And if Trump does indeed raise a clenched fist at the convention, what will it mean?
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
A loaded gesture?
The raised fist has been employed by a wide variety of groups for several different purposes. In the early 20th century, for example, it was associated with socialism, communism and labor unions like the Industrial Workers of the World. In these contexts, it was typically viewed as a symbol of solidarity with others who shared their views.
In the 1960s, however, the raised fist became associated with the Black Power movement. One of the iconic – and controversial – images from the 1968 Olympic Games shows athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who had won medals in the 200-meter event, raising gloved fists over their heads as the U.S. national anthem played.
Bettman/Getty Images
Forty-five years later, particularly after the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and followed by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, it became a potent symbol of Black Lives Matter protesters.
But the gesture has also been adopted by the far right, with the Aryan fist becoming a symbol of white pride during the 1980s.
In many respects, the raised fist has become a generalized gesture of defiance that has been employed by groups as diverse as the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and students protesting education budget cuts in the Philippines that same year.
The gesture is still seen as transgressive. In 2016, Black female cadets at West Point raised their fists for a photo, and this led to an inquiry by the school, although no disciplinary action was taken.
West Point’s superintendent, in a letter to the cadets, wrote, “We all must understand that a symbol or gesture that one group of people may find harmless may offend others. As Army officers, we are not afforded the luxury of a lack of awareness of how we are perceived.”
Fist pump and other variations
Analogs of the raised fist are common in popular culture. The gesture is related to the fist pump that golfers like Tiger Woods frequently engage in. It is also related to the “Success Kid” meme – showing a baby at the beach with a sandy fist and a defiant face – popular on social media in the early 2010s. This could be viewed as a truncated version of the raised fist, just as the fist pump is an expanded version of the gesture.
It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for gestures to undergo fairly major shifts in their meaning. The V sign, made with index and middle fingers raised and separated, was popularized in the early 1940s as standing for resistance and ultimately an Allied victory in World War II. But a generation later, it was co-opted by those opposed to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam and became the peace sign.
Trump and the raised fist
Once public figures make a symbol their own, they tend to employ it habitually.
Richard Nixon, for example, made frequent use of a two-handed “V for victory” gesture during his political career. He even used it in contexts when it seemed wildly inappropriate, such as when, humiliated after his 1974 resignation, he boarded the helicopter that flew him out of Washington and turned to flash those two raised hands and fingers.
Donald Trump has employed the raised fist gesture for decades, and in a variety of contexts. He used it, for example, as a gesture of celebration at the 1990 opening of his Trump Taj Mahal casino and hotel in Atlantic City. But he has also employed it as a symbol of defiance, as he did during a press conference at which he threatened to sue the New York Post in 1994.
Yuki Iwamura / POOL / AFP/Getty Images
As president-elect, he raised a fist in a 2016 Christmas tweet. Perhaps most famously, he raised his fist in triumph during his inauguration in 2017. And during his presidency, he often used the gesture, such as when he arrived in Nashville for a presidential debate in October 2020, raising his fist to service members once he got off his plane at Berry Field Air National Guard Base.
Since public appearances by Trump typically draw mixed crowds of supporters and detractors, his use of a raised fist provides a potent message for both groups. It can function as a gesture of solidarity for those who are with him, and one of defiance against those who oppose him. In this way, Trump’s raised fist is like a Rorschach inkblot, since it allows people to interpret his message according to their own ideological preferences.
Other people in Trump’s orbit have also made symbolic use of the raised fist. Before entering politics, Trump made at least 40 appearances on Howard Stern’s radio show. When Stern moved his program to SiriusXM in 2006, he initially employed a clenched fist as his logo to emphasize the subversive nature of his programming. And there is even a video of a fist-pumping Pauly D and The Situation from “The Jersey Shore” at the Trump Taj Mahal in 2010.
Supporters of Trump, such as U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, have also appropriated the gesture. On Jan. 6, 2021, Hawley raised a fist to show his support for the demonstrators who were converging on the U.S. Capitol – right before he skittered down a hallway in flight from them.
Will delegates at the Republican convention adopt this gesture as well?
Roger J. Kreuz is Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis.
The Conversation arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse and recognition of the vital role that academic experts could play in the public arena. Information has always been essential to democracy. It’s a societal good, like clean water. But many now find it difficult to put their trust in the media and experts who have spent years researching a topic. Instead, they listen to those who have the loudest voices. Those uninformed views are amplified by social media networks that reward those who spark outrage instead of insight or thoughtful discussion. The Conversation seeks to be part of the solution to this problem, to raise up the voices of true experts and to make their knowledge available to everyone. The Conversation publishes nightly at 9 p.m. on FlaglerLive.
Wallingford says
Power to the people!!!
Seems ironic that a man whose father was allegedly a member of the KKK and was cited by the Department of Justice , Civil Rights Division, for Racial Discrimination in the Rental of Apartments to Minorities would use the same clenched fist gesture as used in the 1968 Olympics and by Black Lives Matter. Maybe he thinks they are now “Bros”.
Sm says
What a stupid article. All the stuff going on and you give article on raised fist? Id like to know what your gettin at? So what your saying is a raised fist means anything? And if the rnc adopts it then what? Gimme a freakin break
Bob says
Stupid article. Watch tennis. They always raise a clenched fist after a big point
Ray W. says
Actually, Bob, it might be a very smart article.
Dr. Thomas Reid, an 18th century Scottish philosopher, is believed to be the first to distinguish between body language, which he termed “natural” language, and spoken language, i.e., Spanish, Chinese, etc., which he termed “artificial” language. Wittgenstein is the philosopher most closely associated today with the idea, but he was about 140 years behind Reid.
I looked up the idea of gesticulation. An Italian professor has identified some 250 cultural gestures that are used in daily Italian conversation to express a threat or a desire, to admit shame or pride, to add nuance to the spoken word.
Even as a very young man, I read of the importance of gesticulation and other forms of body language when immersed in the novel, Shogun. Clavell, the author, placed great emphasis on the value of hiding one’s body language, i.e., sitting stone-faced, during diplomatic exchanges.
In the 80s, a psychiatrist wrote of a group of severely autistic patients under his long-term care. The patients lacked communications skills via oral language, but they were great at interpreting body language. He wrote of an incident involving a presidential speech that was televised in a common area. The patients were loudly hooting and gesturing among themselves during certain portions of the president’s speech. They knew whenever the president was lying to the audience by his tone, his cadence, his gestures, his facial expressions. They didn’t understand a word of what he was saying, but they knew when he was lying and when he wasn’t. You would do well yourself, Bob, to study how to discern lying solely from gestures and expressions.
In effect, if a presidential candidate were ever to know that his listeners could neither understand nor care to understand the true intent of his body language, that presidential candidate could use oral language to hide his true intent. What if a presidential candidate ever learned how to hide the depth of his contempt for his followers?
Intonation and cadence, gesture and contortion, together, these forms of natural language can abruptly change a lawyer’s expression of ideas during closing argument to a jury, something I placed great value on when I was practicing trial law.
There is a great big world out there, far bigger than the one that exists solely in the spoken language. Studying that bigger world, learning of its nuances, that can be but one of many keys to a quality life of the mind.
Bobby says
Read Project 2025 it is no joke. If you want your rights, your children and families taken away then do not Vote for Trump who is planning on taken our freedom away. It will no longer be public television it will be controlled by him what we see and watch. Children in public school will have to sign up for the military.
Do yourself a favor and research it, it is pretty scary stuff.
Jane says
It’s a disgusting gesture and makes me furious every time I see him use it. He is anti American in every way. Vote wisely everyone.
Laurel says
My Republican husband hates, hates, hates the Trump fist! I’ve never heard him complain about anyone else doing it. He thinks Trump looks like a Nazi. Like a rich (inherited) white boy needs protest against, um, whatever. I think Trump should straighten his fingers out and show his true intentions.
To think, for one minute, that a regular, middle class working guy, or senior on Social Security, would ever be invited to Mar A Lago is mind boggling. You are being so used. Enjoy your fantasies.
jake says
To think, for one minute, that a regular, middle class working guy, or senior on Social Security, would ever be invited to “Joes Delaware Beach House” is mind boggling. You are being so used. Enjoy your fantasies.
Laurel says
Jake: Cute, but you missed the whole point. President Biden is not my retribution. Trump has claimed “I am your retribution” to his followers. Retribution for what? How does he identify with his followers? How do they identify with him?
I used to live a mile, as the crow flies (Lake Worth, not Palm Beach), from Mar A Lago, which basically means “from river to sea.” We often fished the ICW, and hung out on the little shore on Southern Blvd., right by the entrance to Mar A Lago. We sometimes went to the beach on Palm Beach, which is great for finding sea glass. The residents of Palm Beach, including Trump, do not give a flying fig about the average American, except for maybe lawn care or maid service ,which is often staffed with illegals, or maybe getting together for a photo op at a fund raiser for the “needy” to make them feel better about themselves, and promoting themselves. Being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, while spending a lifetime being nasty to people, not only in the U.S. but in other places like Scotland, how the hell is he your “retribution?” How is it that you do not see through that?
President Biden is NOT my retribution, nor does he claim to be.
Brian says
When Donald Trump raises his clenched fist on November 6, it will indicate that the country is back on track after the left wing hijacking by the gutless, stuttering, stumbling laughingstock Joe Biden and his toadies and shills.
Pierre Tristam says
That’s rich coming from a trump camp where you’re either toady or toast. At least the Biden camp has the courage to challenge its doddering candidate. You all bend over and let him fist you. Don’t blame us for hoping to avoid the rape.
jake says
“At least the Biden camp has the courage to challenge its doddering candidate.”
That pretty rich considering the only reason anyone is “challenging” Joe is because they got caught after the debate debacle. The media has lied, or denied this for years, and Obama has just kept his mouth shut hoping no one would notice.
Pierre Tristam says
The Biden White House like all White Houses built a myth around him but I’m referring to discussions beyond that, where for several years there’s been a sharp and sustained debate and effort in the party and the liberal press to get Biden out of there (including, incidentally, a radio commentary of my own two years ago I didn’t get around to running in print.) So spare us the Fox conspiracy hysterics while your Trump sycophants only bow and boot-lick a man who, in every regard, is mentally, politically and morally a cesspool of unfitness compared to Biden. The Trump camp is simply incapable of self-criticism. It can only parrot the party line, as you droningly do at every turn.
Brian says
Yeah okey dokey – the left wing media has been spewing for three years how Trump is a “threat to democracy” and now it is all exposed that the biggest threat to democracy is the fact that all of Bidens inner circle have been hiding for three years the fact that he is unfit for office, or anything else actually. They now realize that they are looking at a Trump landslide and are scrambling in disarray and panic. Kamala Harris? Everyone knows that The Giggler is a total idiot, so good luck!
Laurel says
Brian: Facts? Republicans don’t need no stickin’ facts. Where are yours again? You know these facts because you are in the oval office?
No, Harris is not a “total idiot” and you know it. Smart women are scary, aren’t they?
Pogo says
@”…Will delegates at the Republican convention adopt this gesture as well?”
Will bears shit in the woods?
Moreover, is there anything people who vote for syphilis incarnate won’t do?
Ray W. says
A short while ago, I stumbled across a 2018 study first published in the journal Brain and Cognition. I was rambling across the internet for studies on lying behaviors, an issue of particular importance today.
As a foundation statement, psychologists, when evaluating potential disability in a child, distinguish between concrete events and theoretical events. A concrete event, such as whether it rained yesterday, differs from abstract skills such as geometry or trigonometry. Some intellectually disabled children are strong in remembering concrete events. Others are not.
An associate professor of psychology theorized that it was possible to discern a difference in brain waves created when a person tells a concrete truth from brain waves created when a person tells a lie about a concrete event.
The researchers used an electroencephalograph (EEG) to discern brain waves. They asked study subjects to answer two separate sets of concrete questions involving memory. Half the questions solicited truthful answers, such as did you use a fork yesterday to eat lunch or did you hit the snooze button on your alarm yesterday morning? The other set of questions, also concrete examples of daily life, which could just as easily have been answered truthfully, were not so answered, as the subjects were told to intentionally lie on their answers.
Sure enough, when the subjects intentionally lied about a concrete event, a set of brain waves was mapped. When they said the truth about a concrete event, the elicited brain waves differed from those elicited when saying the lie.
So far, so good.
Half of the subjects were millennials. The other half? Seniors, aged 60-92.
45 minutes later, all of the subjects were called back to answer the same concrete questions, only this time they were not told to either lie or tell the truth; they just answered the questions.
The hypothesis? Did the participants remember that they had lied on half the concrete questions after the passage of 45 minutes?
“The results showed that compared to the younger group, older adults were more inclined to believe the lie.” In other words, the lies no longer elicited brain waves consistent with telling a lie. The lies elicited brain waves consistent with telling the truth.
One of the researchers stated of the older cohort: “Once they’ve committed to a lie, it’s going to alter whether they remember doing something.”
The authors of the study wrote: “[T]he EEG data revealed that lying engaged the brain processes responsible for working memory. According to Paige (one of the researchers), this finding suggests a lie can embed itself in memory and come to feel as real as the truth.”
“Lying alters memory,” [Paige] said. “It creates a new memory for something that didn’t happen.”
What can FlaglerLive readers take from this? Young people are less susceptible to transform what 45 minutes earlier was known to be a lie into what they now believed to be the truth. If an older person is asked to lie about a concrete event that happened the day before, he or she is more likely to rewrite the truthful memory into a false memory.
This is a very old idea in psychology. One of the earliest studies of this type involved the assassination of JFK. The 1960 presidential election was, up to the 2000 election, the closest in history. It truly was a 50-50 split among the voting public, with the election decided in the electoral college. A much-loved president later shockingly died. A nation stood still upon hearing the news. Months after the assassination, people were surveyed on whom they voted for. Nearly 67% said Kennedy. Those who didn’t vote for him, but later said they did, when asked after a traumatic event, weren’t lying per se, so much as they had rewritten their memory of what was once the truth. They truly believed in the truth of the lie.
Every divorce lawyer knows the story. A year after the wedding, the wife comes into the office seeking a divorce. She tells the divorce attorney that she knew all along that she should never have married her husband. In truth, at the wedding, she was truly happy. She wanted to marry him. But she rewrote her memory after the fact to fit the present state of events. Thus, “she knew it all along.”
One presenter at a conference I attended who knows how many years or decades ago told a room filled with lawyers that memory is an “electro-chemical impulse.” She instructed the attendees that if a person believes another person is truthful, the other person can manipulate a listener’s memory by relying on that trust. A trusted sociopath can lie to a believer, and the believer will immediately rewrite the electro-chemical impulse that was once the truth to reflect the sociopathic lie. Once the original concrete memory of the “old” truth is rewritten to reflect the “new” truth, then what really happened becomes lost. This is the mechanism behind the neo-Nazi movements. As the WWII generation that actually saw the death camps, as the Holocaust survivors die off, as our leaders, both Jewish and non-Jewish who once said never again fade away, it is easier and easier for the sociopaths among us to rewrite a national, a religious, memory. The Holocaust never happened, the sociopathic Holocaust deniers say. The American soldier who told his children that he saw concrete evidence of the death camps is no longer believed; his words of wisdom are lost, the memories rewritten, as the gullible among us listen to the sociopaths among us.
Jakefrom state farm says
Biden with a clinched fist
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-13630315%2FBill-Maher-date-Biden-steps-down.html%3Fito%3Dpinterest_share_article-image-share-ushome&description=Bill Maher predicts the EXACT date Biden will step down for historic reason… before…&media=https%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2F1s%2F2024%2F07%2F13%2F06%2F87280295-0-image-m-24_1720850084792.jpg
Mothersworry says
I’ve heard for years that the president, although important, is not as important as those he/she appoints. Well, we have seen that to be true.
Now the question is do YOU want any more of your rights taken from you? Use your brain when you vote!!
Tony Mac says
Republicans Are Okay With a Criminal as their Leader!
Clearly, we can’t rely on journalists to question directly the candidacy of Donald Trump. It’s too easy to focus on “Biden, Biden, Biden” hour after hour, day after day.
Journalists are falling all over themselves to find any Democrat who wants Biden to step down. But not one of them has the guts to ask any Republican how they can support having a convicted criminal leading their party. The media is walking Trump into the Oval office.
But consider this — and remember not one single “journalist” has posed this to any Republican politician — For the first time in American history, an entire political party, representing millions of Americans, are conceding that it is okay to put a convicted criminal in the Oval Office! An entire political party and its members would rather have a criminal lead this Nation than a decent, honorable man.
And the media refuses to ask any Republican how they justify supporting Trump.
Those “Gatekeepers of Democracy” will fail to do their work and the result could be catastrophic for this Republic.
Ray W. says
I condemn all rhetoric and acts of political violence.
Laurel says
Here’s what I think: I kept wondering why Harris is lied about, yet it’s okay for Trump not to announce his VP running mate. Everyone seems to be accepting this, where there is little chance to have the Republican nomination vetted. Trump and Biden are both old, only three years apart. Both have misnamed people, and both have rambled some nonsensical sentences. So why is cognitive decline only placed on Biden, yet Trump gets to slide by? I believe all this is because it is completely up to the Heritage Foundation and/or the Federalist Society who will choose Trump’s VP running mate. Trump has no say. That way, if he gets in as an old man, there is the chance he will die in office, and the Heritage Foundation’s and/or Federalists Society’s young, appointed VP will be in office. Their draconian ideals will be firmly in place, and Americans will have no say once it’s over. Who knows? Maybe these Nationalists will do in Trump themselves! Their goal completed. Welcome to a new country!
Laurel says
JD Vance absolutely fits my July 14th comment. Vance was introduced to Trump by billionaire Theil. Theil has pushed Vance through with Vance having zero experience, but fits the Heritage Foundation narrative. Trump wins, Trump dies (possibly) young Vance takes over the authoritarian position. Who is Vance? A man who is anti women. This is what we will be stuck with.
Brian says
Well, the last raised fist I saw was Donald Trumps as he was getting shot, so this article is thought provoking. Some scumbag, dead 20 year old creep just handed Trump the keys to the White House in November. God bless dead scumbags.
Laurel says
No chance for Vance to be vetted. He is backed by billionaires. The current Republican Party is for the money, by the money.
“I am your retribution” claimed Trump.