In all fairness, this reporter visits the croaker every three months. Of course, it takes 20 mins. or so; they check my weight, blood presssure & blood, sometimes I pee in a cup (Which has nothing to do w/ lab work & I don't know why I mention it here.) so it's nothing that couldn't be handled by the White House physician in that now-ruined dump. I'm certainly not visiting a hospital for who knows what every quarter. If there's a dental facility in the Executive Mansion there must be a scale, a sphygmomanometer, a few needles & vials & a phlebotomist & a cup. ("Circumstantial evidence" of FDR being administered cocaine for his sinuses the afternoon of 7 Dec. 1941.)Trump Is Dying
The Walter Reed Lie, for the 100th Time
He is seventy-nine. He turns eighty next month. He went to Walter Reed today, his third visit in thirteen months (“Totally normal! Just a third checkup in a year!”), and the White House would like you to believe this is a wellness influencer’s self-care routine rather than what it obviously is: the late-stage management of a long-abused body breaking down in public.
All things must pass.Any M.D.s out there willing to guestimate how much longer Lumpy will be w/ us? What say the prediction markets?The conventional read is that this is power … the dictator phase, the strongman unleashed.I want to suggest the opposite. Strongmen at the height of their game don’t need the ballroom. They don’t need to rename the Kennedy Center after themselves. They don’t need the gold leaf, the fake portraits, the rebranded monuments and memorials.
That’s the behavior of a man who knows the clock is running and is grabbing what he can while the grabbing is good. That’s Marcos in Manila in 1985. That’s Ceaușescu in 1988, before he and the missus were lined up against a wall.
Genuine power doesn’t need to be advertised this loudly. The frantic, escalating, almost pornographic self-celebration is the tell. It’s a confession in plain sight. The man building his mausoleum while he’s still alive is the man who knows he’s running out of road.
