But the rest of his self-care regimen is more murky. Did a doctor ever step forward to explain what really happened to his earlobe after the shooting in Butler? Did the public even see those medical records? Why, no!

After weeks of speculation about the Presidential cankles, the White House announced that he had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a fairly common condition that can also lead to amputation and death.

All we know for sure is that a steady diet of red meat and a little golf have apparently been sufficient to fuel production of the liters of bile required for hourly acts of vengeance.

For the last three days, social media was a-sizzle with macabre speculation about President Trump’s death. Granted it was a slow end-of-summer news weekend and people had a lot of time for wistful musing. He hadn’t looked well recently, his signature word salad was getting way more pronounced and there’s that weird bruise on his paw. Plus, the last Cabinet meeting played out like a creepy living eulogy session. Then he disappeared, without a word of explanation or reassurance in mainstream media.

The information vacuum became a vortex of speculation. Melania was (unreliably, but who knows) reported to have shown up unannounced in the maternity ward at Walter Reed. An unverifiable video went viral of a shadowy figure flinging something brown (a diaper? a McDonald’s bag?) out a third floor window of the White House. A Democrat I know in Washington spent the weekend querying ChatGPT about the prospects for an obese 79 year old with increasingly paraphasic, disorganized speech and with a noticeable weaving gait. Chat kept coming up with the same diagnosis: Transient ischemic attacks (little strokes).

Trump might be doing just fine. But like Biden, he is obviously experiencing some form of decline and his people are scurrying to cover it up. The ridiculous proof of life emissions the White House released over the weekend – old golf pictures and extended maniacal Truth Social rants – did little to reassure.

The old golf pictures presented as new were actually the most alarming sign that something was amiss. The Truth Social rants, not so much. (Clearly, he doesn’t write his own social media pronouncements – in my opinion, an official Trump rant channeler has been at work since covfefe. The tell is consistently correct spelling and perfect grammar, including semicolons and commas. We eagerly await that person’s unmasking.)

Whatever is going on with his health, we might not know about it for a generation or ever. Trump has overturned decades of tradition around transparency when it comes to Presidential health. But given that we are living at a time when the right’s brain trust openly advocates for a return to dictatorship or monarchy, it is worthwhile to remember how the medieval Europeans viewed the king’s body. Essentially it was doubled. The King was his physical body and the body politic. The physical body would decline and die, but the body politic was the eternal part of the man, hence “The King is Dead; Long Live the King.”

Trump can’t live forever. But his physical decline tracks with America’s.

The profound unhealthiness of the Trump moment is all around us: the MAGA social media grifters making bank on quack supplements; its women injected with plastic and hobbled in stilettos like footbound Chinese aristocrats, the reverence for pollution and worship of fossil fuel extraction, for "beautiful coal,” and more cracker plants to produce more tons of nurdles just as the rest of the nations on earth are trying to reduce plastic.

And most unforgivable – the deliberate destruction of our national medical research and public health systems to own the libs, save a few tax dollars for billionaires, and commence the great eugenics project openly cherished by the right wing fringe.

The MAGA movement has undeniable aspects of body horror, a subgenre of horror that involves grotesque degeneration, mutation, or transformation of the human body. The fear body horror evokes is rooted in violations of bodily integrity and the loss of control over one's own physical form, due to mutations, parasitism, infections, and augmentations or modifications. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is considered a principal originator of body horror films like Shivers and Rabid, his remake of The Fly. Think also of extremely unwanted pregnancies involving alien or Satanic gestations such as in Rosemary’s Baby or Alien.

The doddering old man’s body is metaphor for the ghastly corrupting effect he has had on our country: a decade-long descent of our public discourse into profane spectacle, the jettisoning of common decency and empathy in favor of rudeness and cruelty, the daily rituals of public humiliation, open racism and sexism, and the craven terror of the disfigured Republican Party.

How much longer can the health of the body politic withstand the weaving fat man at the podium, the most divisive leader in modern American history, crooning about internal enemies over and over in that saccharine hiss so mesmerizing to so many: “They hate our country. They hate our country. They hate our country”?