The President of the United States has cankles. The condition, known as chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), just means his veins aren’t working great. It’s common, particularly among the elderly—a population group which includes our nearly 80-year-old POTUS.
Of all the things likely to kill a man of Trump’s age and apparent girth, medical professionals seem to think CVI isn’t high on the list. Still, the condition is yet another data point highlighting the decline of the Donald.
Of late, we’ve seen him fall asleep in public on multiple occasions, fail to spot people sitting in the same room with him, confuse his facts and generally act like a man past his personal “sell by” date.
Physical and mental health, of course, should never be diagnosed by a basic cable comedian such as myself. But I’m going to do so anyway. As a layman, I see an old guy in a rumpled suit struggling to walk in a straight line. I see an old guy who cannot form a cogent paragraph. I see an old guy who spackles his face—and his hands—with so much make-up it belies a grasp of self-awareness.
Do we care? Do we not care? Is it a concern that the Executive Branch is being run by a person who treats “do not stare directly at the sun during an eclipse” as a dare?
Obsessing over a president’s health has always been a favorite parlor game among D.C. wags. And with the recent kerfuffle over former President Joe Biden’s health leading to a change atop the ticket still stinging Democrats, the questions about Trump’s fitness are certainly fair.
But I’m not sure they’re particularly salient. It’s not like Trump is the first frail or sickly president. Would, say, the Reagan second administration have been any different if he hadn’t been entering the early stages of Alzheimer’s? What about America’s war policy under the frail FDR?
Trump is old and fat and crazy. He’s going to die relatively soon, one way or the other. Do I think he’ll die in office? I doubt it. Even if he did, his lackeys at the Heritage Foundation and Peter Thiel’s Palantir will Weekend at Bernie’s that mofo if they have to in order to get their oppressive agenda passed.
For all of his awfulness and unlawfulness, Trump is only a symptom of the larger cancer eating the nation. When we speculate on his health, what we’re really expressing is our anxiety about America as a whole. Would we better or worse off if he were to go? Impossible to say. The only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is we would have been better off had he not arrived in the first place.
Just like how Russia won’t turn around when Putin falls out of his own palace window, what ails the United States today won’t be resolved with the passing of one of its central figures. Our problems are deep—deeper even than the pools of purple liquid collecting in Trump’s lower limbs. The man may have exacerbated those problems, but he didn’t cause them, and his eventual passing will not solve them.
A nation such as ours should never be in a position to worry too much about the health of its leader because we’re designed to not be dependent on a single person. That’s the whole point of a democracy. We fought a king because too much power in the hands of too few leads to bad outcomes for too many. If we’re so worried about our president’s health, regardless of who is president, it leads me to believe that our presidents have too much power. This one certainly does.
So yes, it’s dishy to wag our tongues over Trump’s occasional and outlandish medical reports—a perfect human specimen! The tallest, handsomest man who ever lived! The vigor of a teenager!—but my concern isn’t for his actuarial table. It’s for the millions of people whose lives he’s put at risk. People reliant on USAID. People who fled violence in their home nations only to be denied entry to ours. People losing their livelihoods because of these tariffs. People whose own healthcare is at risk with his cuts to Medicaid. His squandered life doesn’t mean sh-t to me. But just because he screwed up his own life doesn’t mean we ought to allow him to rob people of theirs.
I will never wish for the death of another. Personally, I hope Donald J. Trump has a long and healthy life— that he makes it to 110. 120, even. And I want him to spend those years as mentally sharp as possible. The only thing is, though, I want him to live them out inside of an 8×8 federal prison cell.
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