Rouge on the Republic, Bruised Banana in the White House

Donald Trump is Precipitously Declining--both Mentally and Physically--Right Before Our Eyes

The spectacle of American politics, once a grand if noisy bazaar of ideas, has now degenerated into something more akin to a medicine show—complete with greasepaint, snake oil, and a wheezing, creepy, co-opted salesman too demented to recall what he hawked the week before.

The latest grotesquerie from Donald J. Trump is measured less by fact than by foundation. Literally. The man is now applying makeup not just to his jowls, but to his hands.

This week, on the South Lawn of the White House, C-Span’s unblinking lens caught Trump mid harangue about trade. His right mitt was smeared with skin colored gunk, as if he was attempting to conceal our republic’s decay under a hefty dab of pancake.

Even among the true believers—the MAGA faithful who’d gladly elect a lawn gnome (which often bear a striking resemblance to J.D. Vance) if it promised to build a wall— the whispering has begun. Owen Shroyer, a January 6 jailbird and Trump pardon recipient who now delivers right-wing podcasts, muttered that things are “getting strange.”

Official explanation? White House hacks insist Trump bruised his hand by “shaking too many hands.” Medical experts suggest something far less heroic: blood draws. Repeated ones from the top of the right hand.

In elderly, flabby people, like Trump, doctors say the veins up the arm and opposite the elbow are more difficult to tap, because they hide. Much like bone-spurred Americans when it came to serving in Vietnam.

But why, one wonders, is Old Man Orange getting so many jabs?

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says Trump needed multiple blood tests after being diagnosed with “chronic venous insufficiency.” That became obvious when Trump was photographed recently at a FIFA promotional event lifting a trophy, surely the most strenuous activity he’s untertaken since hoisting a cheeseburger.

Then, when Trump sat down, sharp-eyed observers noticed his shoes were untied. Not fashionably undone, but bloated, misshapen, as if strapped around two hams left out too long in the sun.

Swollen ankles, say medical experts, can mean everything from congestive heart failure to kidney disease. The White House says blood tests have shown no evidence of deep vein thrombosis or arterial disease, and that Trump’s physical health is “fine.”

But you don’t have to go back very far, just to 2018, to see that when Ronny “pill mill” Jackson was still White-House “doctor”—claiming Trump would reach Methuselah’s age—Trump was already suffering from heart disease:

For instance, Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician, proclaimed Trump to be in excellent overall health Tuesday, saying that he enjoyed “significant long-term cardiac and overall health benefits” thanks to abstaining from alcohol and tobacco.

But the next day, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, said that Trump already has heart disease. Gupta based that on the president’s rising coronary calcium scores over the years. The measurement, which can predict the likelihood of having coronary artery disease, looks at the amount of plaque present.

And he clearly doesn’t have what you’d call the best and brightest on the health beat these days.

Additionally, Trump’s mental health is clearly in decline. The faculties of this burnt-out ringmaster now operate on a dimmer switch seemingly set permanently to twilight, even if our monopoly media rarely broaches the subject.

This is dangerous for all sorts of reasons. Not the least of which is the jackals he’s surrounded himself with—Hegseth, Noem, Vance, Vought, Milller—unqualified, uncaring, untethered to reality and seemingly ready to pounce for the slightest taste of more power at a moment’s notice.

In a recent exchange with a Fox News reporter (a network that once functioned as his cheerleading squad), Trump confused a question about detainees with a travel itinerary for himself. He might as well have answered, “I like turtles.”

(And if we’re being honest, he’s only gotten this far due to a protection racket. It’s called corporate media).

This is not a man losing his grip—it’s a man who has already crashed the car and is now attempting to explain away blood test bruises by citing the rigor of handshakes. Meanwhile, his team, realizing this, tries to eliminate anyone from public life who would point out the crimes, the betrayals, the cognitive collapse.

Foreign powers have noticed.

In Moscow, Russia’s Kremlin now openly mocks Trump’s decline. Russian media have declared him “unable to speak clearly, coherently, or intelligently” and that Trump, “has clearly lost his mind.” When your old KGB fan club starts calling you insane, and Putin seems ready to to tell you “it’s not you, it’s me,” it may be time to hang up the red tie.

Just in the past week, Trump could not remember whom he appointed to the Federal Reserve. Trump could not parse a basic question. And in literally every appearance before the news cameras, he rambled like a man lost in his own hallway.

Now, even Trump’s own die-hard supporters —a crowd that would cheer if he slapped their mothers, so long as he did it on stage—are murmuring their doubts, taking it out on him as well as Republicans around him.

And these doubts are just pilling on top of others, such as his bombing Iran, cutting Medicaid and the explosive anger at his clear attempt to bury the Jeffrey Epstein files.

This is not merely the story of a bruised hand or a bulging ankle. It is the portrait of a republic slipping on its own banana peel, of a once-mighty office—and country—now reduced to a platform for a carnival barking ghost and his mini-me’s.

The tragedy is not that Trump is sick—he may be, or he may simply be old and absurd. The true tragedy is that, in a nation of 330 million, this is what passes for a President of the United States. We could have elected anyone—Anyone—yet, the deterioration of our societal and political culture, and in particular, a hostile takeover of our media over the past 40 years, led us…here.

Despite it all, somehow, we keep going, led by a man who can no longer tell where he’s going, but insists on driving the hearse anyway.

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David Shuster is an Emmy award winning broadcast journalist who is best known for his work at NBC News and as an anchor MSNBC. He is a contributor to Blue Amp Substack and co-host of our weekly show (Thursdays, 2pm et, on Substack), “Amped Up w/ Cliff Schecter.”

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