For months now, both critics and fans of Donald Trump have been speculating about the exact nature of his puffy features, swollen ankles, and dark bruising.
The unsightly purple and blue blotches have seemingly appeared on Trump’s hands overnight like stigmata.
Much like the road to hell, explanations for the bruising have been long and wide. In February, the White House explained them away as a result of Trump, “constantly working and shaking hands all day, every day.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained, “President Trump is a man of the people, and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history. His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day.”
In July, Trump’s doctor weighed in and said that the American President takes aspirin every day as part of his “cardiovascular prevention regimen,” and one of the side effects of the medication is bruising more easily than a delicate peach.
Yet the jury is still out on the exact cause of Trump’s disfiguring discolouration.
Trump doesn’t look the sort to bruise easily, so could it just be a symptom that the big man is mortal after all, and his thick skin is not so thick? Is the larger than life commander in chief finally showing the wear and tear of the ageing process?
Or is there perhaps a more sinister explanation to be found for Trump’s bruising in the deepest and darkest recesses of the World Wide Web?
Is Trump actually a fang-toothed vampire who has mastered the art of walking in the sun, but nevertheless still desperately needs an infusion of fresh blood to stop the rot of centuries?
Or maybe, Trump is a green-skinned alien from the planet “conspiracy” and the bruising is actually the colour of his true reptilian form beginning to finally show through the flesh and blood facade?
Poppycock and mind rot you might say. Yet, an esteemed publication in the UK named The New Statesman believes that Trump’s bruises are symptoms of American sickness.
Under the dramatic headline, “Donald Trump isn’t dead, he’s just rotting,” they make the argument, albeit in the drawn-out and convoluted way of those who think their words are commandments from ‘Mount Intellectual’ that Trump’s bruising is symbolic of America’s putrefaction.
It’s anybody’s guess why a publication in a country where armed police hang around at airports to arrest people for writing tweets, grooming gangs abuse youngsters with impunity and the Deputy Prime Minister commits tax fraud and gets away with it, feels it necessary to target Trump and suggest his bruising is the “physical correlative,” to America’s “desiccation into divisiveness and despair.”
For whatever reason, Trump inspires that sort of rhetoric on a daily basis, and his every word and gesture gets an awful lot of commentators a little bit breathless.
The simple fact is, Trump’s bruising is nothing more than a biological process, as dermatologist Dr Dustin Portela recently pointed out in a YouTube video.
He explained, “As we age, after about the age of 25 to 30, we start losing about one percent of the collagen in our skin per year. Collagen is what makes our skin have its thickness and resiliency. If you don’t have a lot of collagen to protect the blood vessels, it doesn’t take much to get bruising.”
In other words, Trump may be President, but for pity’s sake, cut the poor guy some slack and leave an old man alone.
