Hurtin’ for certain

CNN

I’m talking about the health of 79-year-old, almost 80, Donald Trump. He’s falling apart in front of our eyes. He didn’t even go out to play golf on Memorial Day weekend. He wasn’t seen in public for six days following his medical checkup at Walter Reed. When stories about his absence from the public eye began to fill the airways, they trundled him out in the Oval Office on Wednesday to sign two executive orders. At least that was the formal reason for the appearance. The real reason was that Trump wanted to talk about his big beautiful reflecting pool, because everything in Washington D.C. is now his reflecting pool, his ballroom, his Kennedy Center…at least it was until his name came down after a judge’s order.

The most visible sign of Trump’s deteriorating health is his constant penchant for falling asleep during his public appearances. His eyes droop, then they close. His mouth sags. His chin falls to his chest. His head lolls to the side. Sometimes he’ll catch himself, jerking awake for a moment, only to slip into dreamland seconds later.

It’s a thing at this point. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was forced to tell members of Congress at a hearing the other day that he has never seen Trump fall asleep in public. Rubio sits next to him at cabinet meetings, with Hegseth on Trump’s other side. Neither man could possibly miss the sleeping president next to them, so Rubio lied to a House committee, even after Representative Ted Lieu showed him a video reel of Trump sleeping during cabinet meetings with Rubio right next to him.

Dick Cheney’s former cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, having read the Walter Reed report of Trump’s “annual” checkup that he’s had three times in the last 13 months, called Trump’s condition a “sleep disorder” and said its absence from his health report was a “glaring omission.”

Lots of physicians have weighed in since the Walter Reed visit, and a consensus seems to be emerging that Trump is suffering from a medical condition called “severe daytime somnolence.” Some doctors say it could be caused by Trump having sleep apnea and refusing to use a CPAP, or “continuous positive airway pressure” device, a mask hooked up to a pump that forces a constant stream of air through upper airway passages to keep them open. Sleep apnea is fairly common among overweight individuals also suffering from an aging, weakened heart, which seems likely in Trump’s case, because he has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a circulatory problem that causes blood to collect in the body’s lower extremities, in Trump’s case, his visibly bulging ankles.

Trump is 79. I’m 79. I have various health problems, including COPD and a weakened heart having suffered a heart attack, by pass, and the insertion of a stent. In short, my lungs and heart don’t function as well as they did when I was younger.

I can tell you without hesitation that the way to deal with an aging, damaged body is by taking the life that you have been granted with a sense of humor and grateful acceptance. Neither of these ways of coping are in what we might call Trump’s wheelhouse.

Trump clearly resents the effects of his aging. He has probably been told that he can improve his sleep patterns by sleeping with his upper body elevated by a slant board and using a CPAP. The result of clearly refusing these recommendations is visible every night and every day.

He is an extraordinarily unhappy person. When he is up at night, he gets on his failing social network and fires angry volleys at everyone from sick and hungry children to the Pope. It is likely that in the mornings, he stuffs himself with sugary baked goods and washes it all down with Diet Cokes. Then he goes to whatever meetings that have been set for the day and the minute he is finished with prepared remarks, he falls asleep, even during the mandatory shower of praises lavished on him by his suckupulent cabinet.

All this would be, if not acceptable, at least understandable. But the man is allegedly “running” an utterly misbegotten war he got himself and our military into, and it has resulted in what amounts to an incipient international recession and the anger of allies and enemies alike. Because he has no ability to see himself in any manner other than as the kind of superhero images he has some AI system crank out for him, he has no idea what to do about the state he’s gotten himself into except to blame it on everyone else. That’s where his oration about “communists” came from the other day as he signed executive orders in front of members of his cabinet and the press. He dove into name calling. The mayor of Chicago is “a low IQ person.” The governor of Illinois is a “slob.” He hates the states that didn’t vote for him, the countries of Europe that did not support his war on Iran, even though he not only did not ask for their help but did not even inform them of the attack he ordered on Iran in advance.

Everyone is against him and his failing body. His ankles must be incredibly uncomfortable, stuffed as they are into a pair of business-style Florsheim shoes that appear so worn, they’re nearly falling apart. On Wednesday, his right eye was swollen nearly shut at times. His speech was normal, then slurred, then back to normal as the anger he expressed rose in volume. Talking about the reflecting pool brought up his resentment of Martin Luther King, whose speech given from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is celebrated decades after he made it. Trump did his usual lying about crowd sizes, King’s and his, bragging that his was larger. He is the only person on the face of this earth who when thinking of Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, talks about crowd sizes rather than a Black preacher and civil rights leader’s hope for the future of this country and the world.

It is so sad to contemplate the hole that Trump has dug for himself and from the bottom of which he screams pains and complaints and hatreds and resentments. This man and his grimacing face covered in badly applied makeup and his absurdly constructed and dyed hair have become commonplace alongside his lies and whining and obsessions with his own and other people’s IQ. I cannot think of having seen “IQ” treated seriously in the current events of our national life until Donald Trump came along and turned two letters of the alphabet into, alternately, weapons to be swung and salve for his own wounds.

That alone tells you almost as much as anyone would ever need to write a history of this time. Suddenly, a measurement of intelligence that was long ago ignored if not discredited was made to matter. Suddenly, a grotesque man wearing ill-fitting clothing declared himself the final arbiter of the beauty of human beings and buildings and forced his judgements upon our world, parts of which were all too willing to be ruled by an arbiter unequipped with either taste or morals.

He recently declared that the lighting fixture for the mixed martial arts jamboree he is giving to himself as a birthday present on the lawn of the White House is as beautiful as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and he intends to leave it where it is as a monument to himself, along with his planned ballroom with its “drone port” rooftop.

Piece by piece, he is changing our nation’s capital into a suburban strip mall. Ready the dozers and jackhammers. 2028 will be here sooner than we think.