There are two records now, and they do not match. One is kept by the White House physician, recited by the press secretary, and amplified by the cabinet, and it describes a man in excellent health, sharp and energetic and brilliant and awake and alert, acing examinations no president before him was supposedly brave enough to take. The other record is kept by your own eyes, every time the cameras find him, and it describes something else entirely. The distance between those two records is the whole story, and the daily labor of this administration is the work of insisting that the first one is real and that the second one is a symptom of your derangement.
Look at what the cameras keep. He turns eighty on the fourteenth of June, the oldest man ever sworn into the office. He went more than a week without a public appearance after the cabinet meeting of May 27, an absence long enough that the word stroke began circulating on the Hill and refused to stop. When he does surface, the hand is bruised and kept out of frame, the voice has thinned to something papery and unsure of itself, the legs swell, the stance wanders, and the man who once flooded a room now appears to be draining out of it in real time. He has fallen asleep at his own cabinet table while a subordinate spoke. He has stood beside a man he was there to honor and failed to produce his name. He has confused Venezuela with Iran in front of the press. None of this is a single bad afternoon to be charitably forgiven. It is the steady weather. It is the condition.
And then, this morning, the tell. The Washington Post reported that finasteride, the drug sold as Propecia that his own first-term physicians said he took routinely, has quietly disappeared from his medical reports since he returned to office, and that the White House will not say why, or whether he is still taking it. Taken alone, this would be a footnote, a vain man’s small cosmetic embarrassment. It does not stand alone. Finasteride suppresses PSA, the prostate-specific antigen, the figure doctors watch as the warning flare for prostate cancer. And over the past year, according to the reporting on his latest results, that figure climbed roughly tenfold, enough that the cardiologist Jonathan Reiner, who teaches medicine and reads documents like these for a living, stopped to raise the obvious questions.
Sit inside the architecture of that. The drug that lowers the warning number has been removed from the published chart, in the very window during which the warning number it lowers has multiplied by ten. Whether the medication was actually stopped or merely scrubbed from the page, the result is the same. The most alarming figure on the report now arrives stripped of the one piece of context that would explain how alarming it is. The record is not a record. It is a composition. The absence is the tell, as it always is with this man, because what he removes from a document has always told you more than anything he is willing to leave on it.
He confessed the whole logic himself, in the one honest sentence he has offered on the subject. Asked about the advanced imaging he underwent in October, he told the Wall Street Journal he regretted it, because it had given his critics, in his own words, a little ammunition. Read that for what it is. The purpose of a presidential medical disclosure is to inform the public about the condition of the person holding the most dangerous job on the planet. He has told you, in plain language, that he understands its purpose differently, that a true finding is not information to him but ammunition, a thing to be kept from the enemy. They are not releasing his medical records. They are releasing his medical press releases, and the editing is the entire point.
Watch what gets stacked on top of that edited page. His physician, a Navy captain named Sean Barbabella, signed a memo certifying excellent health. The president himself announced, in capital letters, that he is in PERFECT HEALTH and ACED his cognitive examination, correct on every question, the third straight time, a feat he insists no prior president was willing to attempt, untroubled by the fact that the examination he keeps boasting about acing is a screening test for dementia and not a measure of brilliance. The press secretary recites the adjectives. The cabinet supplies the chorus, the same cabinet that sat and clapped while he slept, the same Vice President who once called him America’s Hitler and now testifies to the quality of his vigor. The words arrive on schedule and in formation, energetic and sharp and brilliant and awake and alert, in precise contradiction of the body on the screen behind them.
This is the mechanism, and it deserves to be named, because it is being run on you in particular. The chorus is not performing for him. He has needed no convincing of his own brilliance through every bankruptcy and indictment of his life, and he does not need it now. The chorus is performing for you. A cover-up conducted at the scale of a state requires that the witnesses be made to distrust their own senses, and the function of a roomful of credentialed officials calling a failing man brilliant is to convert your plain and accurate perception into the malfunction in the room. If everyone with a title agrees that the swaying, thinning, vanishing octogenarian is a portrait of vigor, then your suspicion that he is not becomes the condition requiring treatment. They have a word ready for that, too. They call it derangement, and they have assembled an entire vocabulary to file your functioning eyesight under the heading of illness.
So let us be plain, in the present tense, while the present tense still belongs to us. A man is dying in the most public job in the world. Not as a metaphor, not at some comfortable future date, but visibly, on camera, on a clock the rest of us can read, his body filing its honest reports in bruises and swelling and silence while his staff files dishonest ones in all capitals. He may have months. He may have years. The timeline is not the argument, because none of us can know it and his doctors will not say. The argument is that the decline is happening in front of three hundred million people, and that the official response to a thing happening in front of three hundred million people has been to deny that it is happening at all, and to pathologize the three hundred million for the offense of noticing.
The chart will say excellent health. The memo will say excellent health. The cabinet will say brilliant and energetic and sharp, and they will say it again tomorrow, with the same arranged faces, over the same failing body, while it goes on doing in public what failing bodies do.
Keep your own record. Trust the one your eyes have been keeping all along.
He is dying in front of you, and they are calling it strength.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Reuters
Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
Good lord, enough with congress and their bloody "decorum", Ted Lieu at least had the spine to show little Marco video of the man falling asleep while he was talking. This needs to be done over and over, they need to stand up and fucking say it plainly;
"Come on, can we stop doing this? It's just plain silly, the man can't speak a coherent sentence, and you're calling it brilliance, if this is what passes for "brilliance", in YOUR world, then I put it to you gentlemen, that NONE OF YOU, is qualified for the position he now holds."
Ffs, BRING a MoCA to the meeting, it is a fairly simple examination, TAKE IT, right there in the meeting, start with the final question. Seems to me there are a number of things you could do to derail this stupidity. It's embarrassing, and painful to watch, it really is completely silly. It would be one thing if he were actually fooling anyone but himself, but, it is MORE than painfully obvious to anyone with functioning senses, it's like throwing a dead cat on the table, and telling us it's dancing.
Best reality TV show ever. “Celebrity Rigor Mortis”