Did I write "hair"? I meant "health."
I was thinking about this post from 2015:
Questions America Is Asking: What Is Donald Trump's Hair Worth?
Mozart's locks are going up for auction at Sotheby's, which makes us wonder which factors make celebrity hair a worthy investment. As a barometer, we asked the experts to appraise Donald Trump's....
Which backlinked to a couple posts from 2012:
UPDATING, CORRECTING: "Trump intends to endorse Romney"
Correcting, amplifying and updating this morning's "Report: Trump to Endorse Gingrich, Self".
Anyhoo, moving forward
From New York Magazine's Intelligencer, January 26:
A good-faith attempt to ascertain the truth about Donald Trump’s health.
When I arrived at the Oval Office in December to talk to Donald Trump about his health, the president was standing next to a couple of men clutching pieces of paper labeled TALKING POINTS.
“These are two doctors,” Trump told me before I could ask a question. “And by the way, I don’t know them, they’re not my best friends. They’re respected doctors that practice out of Walter Reed. And they happen to be taking care of me for anything — but I don’t need any taking care of because I’m in perfect health. I do purposely every year or less a physical, because I think the American people should know that the president is healthy so you don’t get a guy like the last one, who was the worst thing that ever happened to older people. Because I know people in their 90s that are 100 percent. Gary Player is 90 years old. He shot 70 with me the other day.”
Trump gestured at everyone present — me, the doctors, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt — to follow him into the room.
“Let’s sit for a couple of minutes,” he said. “I hate to waste a lot of time on this, but if you’re going to write a bad story about my health, I’m going to sue the ass off of New York Magazine. There will be a time when you can write that story, maybe in two years, three years, five years — five years, no one is going to care, I guess. Go ahead and sit down.”
Despite the president’s protests, the White House realizes that the time to talk about his health is now. Speculation about his fitness for office is rampant; armchair physicians have given him months and sometimes even days to live. “That right there looks like a leg bag for a urinary catheter,” a physical therapist claimed in an Instagram with 19 million views, pointing to a bulge in Trump’s pants. In recent months, Trump has been caught seeming to fall asleep during public events, making him the butt of recurring jokes on The Onion (“Trump Appears to Doze During Stroke”). His right hand is constantly bruised and often bandaged. In July, his ankles swelled up like the Michelin Man, a symptom, his doctors said, of “chronic venous insufficiency” — a common circulatory condition. In August, when Trump took a break from public appearances for a few days, “Trump Is Dead” began trending on social media. “I got calls from friends that said, ‘Thank God you picked up the phone,’” Trump told me. “‘Because there’s a report that you died.’”
In September, Trump made headlines at a 9/11 memorial event because the right side of his face appeared “droopy”; in October, he went to Walter Reed and received what he said was an MRI, and when asked why, he suspiciously couldn’t recall which part of his body had been imaged; on New Year’s Eve, he was spotted apparently limping into a black-tie party at Mar-a-Lago; in January, his mental fitness was called into question when he demanded control of Greenland because he hadn’t been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, prompting calls for Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment; and later that month, he showed up in Davos with a new bruise on his left hand.
That Trump couldn’t stop talking about his “perfect health” at rallies and on Truth Social only convinced people something was wrong. That he started making jokes about how he wasn’t on track to get into Heaven only added more fodder for conspiracy theorists. And the fact that his predecessor in the Oval Office began his disastrous decline at around the same age has only made the questions surrounding Trump’s health more palpably urgent.
“I feel the same as I did 40 years ago,” he said, settling in behind the Resolute desk. Warm afternoon light from the window illuminated his famous hair, once dyed golden and now its natural white — his “only concession to age,” one of his senior staffers told me. In person, Trump looks trimmer than he does on television, though he denies he’s ever been on a GLP-1 or, as he calls it, “the fat drug.” (His last physical, this past April, listed him as weighing 224 pounds, but he told me he’s currently “about 235.”) He stands a little hunched and his eyes are puffy, but he looks pretty good for a 79-year-old. His hearing, according to a senior staff member, isn’t what it used to be (the staffer doesn’t think Trump has noticed this about himself, despite regularly leaning in and requesting people speak up). His right hand, warm and soft during our handshake, looked like rhino hide on the back: dry and gray, the notorious bruise spread out like an inkblot test.
The president’s discolored hand has become something of a smoking gun for those on Donald Trump Deathwatch, evidence, perhaps, that he’s getting surreptitious IVs to treat an undisclosed illness. “They’re looking very Queen Elizabeth–esque,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller has said, referring to photos of her Royal Highness’s bruised hands shortly before she died. It doesn’t help that Trump covers the bruise with a large dollop of makeup and can seem testy when people bring up the subject. Late last year, a Republican operative showed Trump his own hand injury to try to relate. “He wasn’t amused,” the operative told me. When Trump met with the much younger Zohran Mamdani in the Oval Office in November, I watched up close as Trump spent the public portion of the meeting shielding the bruise with his left hand. On occasion he would sneak a peek at the mark as if checking the time.
“This is only from shaking hands,” he said now, rubbing his left thumb over the back of his right hand, a claim he would repeat to other journalists. Trump turned to the doctors, Captain Sean Barbabella, his lead physician, and Colonel James Jones, a physician’s assistant with a Ph.D. in health science.
“Can you just verify that?” he said.
“Absolutely,” said Barbabella, a short man with close-cropped hair and a nervous smile. “I’ve seen the president shaking hands for over an hour.” Trump held up his non-shaking hand. “Look, this one’s perfect,” he said. “People say, ‘What beautiful skin you have.’” (The White House said the bruise that appeared on his left hand in Davos was caused by him hitting it against a table corner. Trump also blamed women’s fingernails and rings for the cuts on his right hand, including one particularly nasty “slice” that came from a botched high five with Attorney General Pam Bondi.)
It would be easy, Trump said, to stop the bruising and end the rumors of his imminent demise. All he would have to do is stop taking so much aspirin, which he claims is necessary to prevent his blood from becoming too thick. “I want thin blood,” he said. “Real thin blood.” In 2016, Trump shocked executives from a major pharmaceutical company when he told them he took 325 milligrams of the company’s aspirin each day. “You shouldn’t be taking that much,” one of the executives said, according to a person familiar with his comments. “Do your doctors know?” Trump said they did and didn’t approve. “But it works for me,” he said. He told me, “I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and I don’t want to change. You know what? You’re in the Oval Office now, right? I don’t want to change a thing.”
Rather than change, Trump tends to force the world to adapt to him. If there was a conspiracy of silence protecting Joe Biden when questions arose about his mental and physical decline, there’s a cacophony around Trump. Numerous members of his inner circle have clamored to tell me tales of the president’s godlike virility. “He can work harder and he has a better memory and he has more stamina and has more energy than a normal mortal,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told me. “The headline of your story should be ‘The Superhuman President.’”
These strenuous assertions came alongside signs that made Trump seem more mortal than ever, from his dismal approval rating to the growing likelihood that Republicans will lose control of at least one chamber of Congress in this fall’s midterms. Already, pundits have started calling him a lame duck, a term typically saved for the third year of a presidency, which might partly explain the vigorous flurry of activity he has undertaken in Nigeria, Venezuela, Minneapolis, Greenland, and beyond. He has gamely entertained discussions about whether Marco Rubio or J. D. Vance will succeed him, which in one sense is an acknowledgment of his mortality. In another sense, the succession represents a way for him to live forever — a conceit, I soon learned, that was perpetuated by the bubble of loyalists and supplicants and advisers that constantly surrounds him and that seemed indicative of the late-empire stage of Trump’s decade-plus-long dominance of American life.
“Real fast,” Trump said, turning to the doctors in the room. “Is my health perfect?”
“Your health is excellent, sir,” Jones said.....
....MUCH MORE
The bit about Secretary of State (former acting director USAID and acting director National Archives) trying to get some sleep on Air Force One is pretty funny.
