An Unscheduled Hospital Visit

President Donald Trump spent a couple of hours in Walter Reed Hospital on Saturday, and there’s much speculation about why. Trump has “tweeted” it was just “phase one” of his annual checkup, but there are reasons to doubt that.

For one thing, Trump’s last annual checkup was only nine months ago, and he doesn’t strike us as the sort who wants to undergo another one any sooner than he has to. For another thing, checkups are rarely done in phases. For yet another thing, the hospital visit was not on the president’s published daily schedule and seems to have arranged hastily. Also, there’s a medical unit at the White House that has previously sufficed for presidential checkups.

The biggest reason for the skepticism, though, is that what Trump says so often turns out to be a big fat lie. Speaking of big and fat, his previous checkup results clearly overstated his height and understated his weight, and Trump was so pleased by he nominated one of the doctors to be director of the Veterans Administration, although the nomination was withdrawn when the Republicans in Congress after allegations of staff harassment and script-writing surfaced and everyone noticed the doctor had no administrative experience.

During the election Trump broke with longstanding tradition by refusing to release his medical records, and instead offered a four-paragraph letter from his weird-looking gastroenterologist testifying that the candidate’s “strength and stamina are extraordinary” and “his laboratory tests results are astonishingly excellent,” and oddly enough that “Mr. Trump has had a medical examination showed only positive results.” The letter concluded that Trump would be “the healthiest person ever elected to the presidency,” and judging by that hyperbolic prose style and the things that no licensed physician would ever say it was clear that Trump dictated it, which the doctor later acknowledged.

Trump feels obliged to always present an image of alpha male invincibility, bragging about his artificially deflated golf scores and even his penis size, as well as constantly denigrating the energy levels and physical attractiveness of his foes, so he’d surely be loathe to admit to even the most minor sort of ailment that might bring a mere human being to a hospital for a couple of hours. Given that at 73-years-of-age Trump is the oldest president ever, with a well known penchant for fast food and an aversion to any exercise that doesn’t involve a golf cart, as well as well-established record of telling big fat lies, the skepticism about Trump’s brief time in the hospital is inevitable.

We’re not prone to conspiracy theories about a politician’s health, such as the ones Trump fans peddled back when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton fainted on a hot New York City sidewalk and then died and was replaced by a body double, but it’s easy to believe that Trump had some minor ailment that more normal people would admit to. We truly hope that’s the most benign explanation for Trump’s impromptus motorcade visit to Walter Reed, and that whatever tests Trump had there yielded only those hoped-for negative results, and that he soldiers on through his likely impeachment.

Even so, we’d be more reassured about the health of our septuagenarian president if he weren’t so big and fat and such a big fat liar.

— Bud Norman

The Curious Case of the Candidate’s Body Double

Lately we’ve been spending some time at Netflix binge-watching episodes of a British documentary series about conspiracy theories, partly because we need some diversion from that awful presidential race but mostly because we enjoy a good conspiracy theory the way some readers revel in a good mystery novel. It’s just our luck in this crazy election year, though, that the most diverting conspiracy theory we’ve lately encountered comes from that awful presidential race.

Unless you’re much better than us at avoiding the news, you already know that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was videotaped collapsing into the arms of her aides as she took an early exit from a memorial service for the victims of the 2001 terror attacks in New York on Sunday, and that it has brought all the lingering questions about her health from the comments sections of the more conspiratorial-minded web sites to the front pages of the even the most polite press. By you also know that she was whisked to her daughter’s nearby apartment rather than to a hospital, and that she emerged from the apartment just a few hours later looking quite hale and happy as she waved to photographers and greeted a cute young girl who who happened to be on the sidewalk. If you’re attuned to the proper “Twitter” feeds and internet sites, or the more mainstream portions of the press that report their speculations, you might even be aware of the theory that the Clinton who emerged from that apartment building looking suspiciously healthy with a suspicious lack of secret services agents around a suspiciously cute young girl to greet her was actually a body double.

More careful observers than ourselves noticed a slight difference in the nose and a change of earrings, as well as more general youthful appearance, and along with those other suspicious circumstances that was enough to lead some to a conclusion that a body double had been substituted. The theory doesn’t explain how the body double happened to be on hand in Clinton’s daughter’s apartment, or what became of the actual Clinton, or why a campaign so diabolically brilliant as to have such a convincing doppelgänger around in case of a collapse has lately been slipping in the polls against the likes of Republican nominee Donald Trump, but in this crazy year we suppose that anything is possible.

As far-fetched as it might seem, the theory gained enough currency that it was briefly the second-most “trending” topic on “Twitter,” which also spurred conspiracies theories. A Reditt site devoted to Trump supporters alleged “#HillarysBodyDouble is NOT truly trending on Twitter, But They Stuck It on the Trends to Make Us Look Nuts,” which might also strike some non-Trump supporters as randomly capitalized and completely nuts. A writer for the InfoWars site, which has alleged that the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were an inside job and that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and countless other conspiracy theories, and has lately been insisting that Clinton has Parkinson’s Disease or syphilis or a brain tumor, “tweeted” that “The #Hillary’sBodyDouble narrative was probably started by the Clinton campaign to discredit genuine questions about her health.”

Some of the rumors specified that the body double is a woman named Teresa Bonwell, who resembles Clinton closely enough that she’s made living as a look-alike for the past several years, and she seems to have fueled that speculation by sending out an old photograph of herself outside the same building with the taunting message “Maybe I was in New York.” She now insists it was a joke, and has the ironclad alibi of being at a video shoot with a Bill Clinton look-alike and, just to make things perfect, the guy who played President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in “Idiocracy.”

Despite the Hollywood-like ingenuity of the body double switch, that crafty Clinton campaign hasn’t seemed to discredit any truly genuine questions about her health, which are being raised in even the most polite press, and by now even her supporters are conceding that she should have been more forthcoming about condition. Some supporters are even admitting that Clinton’s longstanding tendency toward secrecy has made even the most outlandish speculations seem plausible, and if that body double finishes out the campaign for Clinton she’s bound to endure some interrogations about it. That guy who’s been filling in for the late Paul McCartney the past 50 years has done pretty well, though, so maybe she’ll pull it off.

Thus far Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet about Clinton’s condition, but he’s also the guy who championed that Obama-was-born-in-Kenya theory and parrots the Code Pink line about George W. Bush lying America into the Iraq War and urged everyone to read The National Inquirer’s big story about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’ dad being in on the John F. Kennedy assassination, and he frequently finds that things are rigged, so he probably won’t have anything bad to say about what his friends at InfoWars are saying. He should urge his supporters to stick to the facts, though, because those are bad enough.

— Bud Norman