Bulwark Takes - Does Trump’s Bruised Hand Story Make Sense?

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

Sam Stein and Jared Poland give their takes on a curious White House claim. After repeated questions about Donald Trump’s bruised hand, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was caused by constant handshaking and aspirin use. So we decided to test it.

Welcome winner with Scarborough Nissan. Lease a 26 rogue-ass all-wheel drive from only 0.9% for 36 months. Or a 26 KixS for only 349 monthly with 1249 down for 48 months. Scarborough Nissan, award-winning cars from award-winning people at Warden & Egglington or Scarborough Nissan.com. Conditions apply. Nissan is number one for new vehicle quality among mainstream brands in the 2025 J.D. Power U.S. initial quality study. Hey Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic

game show. Only at BetMGM. Access to the Price is right fortune pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2-6-600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BenMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey, everybody, it's me. Sam Stein, managing Eric DeBorke. I'm joined by Jared Poland, who is the guru of everything we do.

All the good stuff that you see on your computer, that's him. He makes this look good. Jared, good to see you, buddy. How you doing? I'm doing good. Ready for the holidays. 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 at least yeah 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 a lot of makeup covering it up and it's perplexed a lot of people like why is this what why is this happening what 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 yeah uh for the most part caroline has uh kind of just beat around the bush on the question like she'll get asked about trump's hand and uh she pretty much always blames it on the handshakes on his aspirin intake 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 an incredible bruising. And I had this idea in my head, well, that seems testable.

Like, 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. 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 when you were one of those people. I was one of those people.

Yeah, right out of college, that's what I was doing. 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. But I realized with the handshakes, it would 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 sat 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. Did people look at you weirdly? 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. So maybe they had already, they just shaken Donald Trump's hand and now they got yours. So it was actually much more scientific than we thought, the same type of handshakes he was enduring. What was the most hilarious interaction you got? Uh, there was these two guys that were going, I think, to the John Cena's final match, um, 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 did were just these same guys. And they came back like 20 minutes later and were like one for the road. And so I should have their hands were. Maybe. I mean, they were having a good day. They were maybe college age. Um, okay. 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. Was it? I mean, it was cold. It was like 40 degrees out. I think at one point I was like, I can't fill my toes, Sam Stein. I cannot fill my toes, Samstein. 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. 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. Did you bring Purell? Yes, I had a thing of hand sanitizer to the side.

Gotta have the hand sanitizer. And people, once I saw that, we're 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. Did you apply it after every single? Oh, I applied, yeah. Not after every single one, but like every five, ten minutes, I just reached down, do a quick apply. Oh, my God.

to CVS beforehand and grab that just so I'd be prepared. 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 handshicks did you ultimately shake? 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. All right, let's watch the experience. 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 what she said this. 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. I bought some bare aspirin. I'm going to take one, shake a bunch of hands, and we're going to do it 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. Whoa! Oh, I don't need that.

There you go. So we're like an hour and a half then. I'm shaking a lot of hands. I'm gonna keep going. Handstone on 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. All right. So there you have it. Now, your hand hurt. I think that's fair to say. Yeah.

And the hours after it started to hurt, but the next morning, it was genuinely sore. Genuinely sore. Okay. No bruising, but this was just a one-time experience. So you're not doing this day and day out. And I don't know if Trump's 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 and a little bit, you know, bruised up if you were doing a version of that, you know, every day?

Yeah, I think it is, I used to watch Mythbusters a lot growing up, and they would say it was plausible. Plausible. 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 result that could happen. Well, let's think here. How many hands do we think Trump is shaking a day? It's obvious, it's not 350.

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? 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 going to shake.

And I doubt he gets, maybe a hundred. that holiday party. No, no, no. Yeah, but are they all getting a handshake with Trump? He normally charged like a hundred K for those. There's a, oh, maybe he doesn't do the photo line. 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. But that seems like a lot, too. Now, that even, 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. 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's not a big fan of shaking hands.

When, like, you know, when Kennedy comes in to brief from her Besson, 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. 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 workday, but it's 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 me, people talk to them. It was a fun experiment. People laughed about it. So it was a good time. It's good to know, because I don't know if you know this about me. I think you might have discovered this. I like gimmick journalism. like this shit. 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 Cori Lundaski, where they revealed Trump's diet. And it was like a lot of McDonald's and eggs and bacon

and steak and Diet Coke's 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 the 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 report 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? Feel free. I'm down to try the crazy ideas. All right. So, 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. Thank you. When you want to bet on sports, played on a field or ice or courts. Begg Rivers is the place.

Over under money lines, same game, Paul, it's all fine. You put a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with that river sports book. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600, to speak to an advisor free of charge.