Don-old
Now that our candidate is a strapping and fit 59 years old, at the height of her mental powers, we have nothing to fear from comparisons. At the end of two terms Kamala Harris will be a relatively young and healthy 68, ten years younger than Donald Trump is right now. The poor old New York Times can no longer publish daily laments about our poor old candidate. The only geezer left in this race is a Republican. Now that it’s safe to do so, it’s time to haul out the age card on Donald Trump. Let’s revel in it.
Of course, 78 isn’t an automatically disqualifying age. Experience has shown that it’s possible to be that age and be relatively effective and alert. But not Trump. Contrary to his repeated boast that he “aced” a cognition test, Trump frequently exhibits signs of acute mental decline. He falls asleep at absurdly inappropriate times. He frequently speaks in long, rambling, incoherent sentences. He has difficulty thinking and sustaining attention, multitasking or word-finding. He mispronounces words. He occasionally even commits the ultimate cognitive fail: he forgets who the President of the United States is.
So why is Donald Trump so much mentally worse off than your average 78 year old? To what do we owe his rapidly advancing cognitive decline? We’ve known about the reason for as long as we’ve known about him, particularly for as long as we’ve been forced to acknowledge the inimical criminal Trump as a force in American politics, whether we liked it or not. The fault lies with Trump himself, and the answer has been staring us in the face for nearly ten years.
Trump is what you get when you eat McDonald’s or KFC at every meal for decades. Trump is what you get when you never exercise a day in your life, when you never go on a diet, when you never devote a second’s worth of thought about what kind of crap you put in your body.
Your mother was right all along, you should eat your vegetables. Shakespeare knew about it four hundred years ago when he said, “Make rich the ribs but bankrupt quite the wits.” Trump has a calamitously stupid diet. And it shows.
We don’t need to reach for fancy medical reasons to explain Trump’s alarming mental and physical decline. We don’t have to scratch our heads and wonder how he got this bad. His diet, to put it in technical medical terms, sucks. It is in fact the worst diet I have ever seen in my life. It’s really a miracle that he’s still alive.
But when your diet is that awful and your life is so routinely sedentary then you have to use lots and lots of props to hide it. Tons of makeup to hide the blotchy, unhealthy skin. Huge baggy suits to hide the huge baggy body. Face bronzers to hide the pallor. And then there’s his hair — I don’t know what the hell he’s doing with that.
We shouldn’t just be pointing all this out on a daily basis, we should use Trump as a cautionary tale in our own lives. We should be telling our children to eat their broccoli so they don’t grow up to look like Don-old.
Unlike Barack Obama, we will never see Donald Trump in a bathing suit. That would be a public relations disaster for Trump that he would never live down. And he has nobody to blame but himself. Like Jacob Marley’s ghost, Trump fashioned his own unhealthy physical and mental chain link by link and yard by yard. He’s his very own creation. He’s F-A-T thanks to KFC. He’s Donald by McDonald’s.
Donald Trump is a mental and physical wreck thanks to his own self-neglect in concert with America’s greedy and destructive junk food industry. He treats his body with the same casual disdain that he treats the planet. He wants to let huge corporations do to our precious planet what he’s let huge corporations do to his corporeal self. He’s a walking advertisement for what’s wrong with him, and a walking cautionary tale for the destruction he will bring to America. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.