1) The bruised hands. The puzzle of Trump's badly bruised and heavily make-up-ed hands has been one of the summer's odder presidential story lines. The White House has maintained that the bruises come from how much Trump loves shaking hands. "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," Karoline Leavitt said.
White House physician Sean Barbabella breezily dismissed the bruising in a memo, saying it was "benign" and "consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking," but there's reason to believe there's more to it than that. For one thing, the bruising isn't limited to his dominant handshaking hand; it also has been a regularly recurring phenomenon of the last year. Barbabella's dismissal also raises some curious questions, saying it's a common side-effect of "aspirin therapy," but it's not clear from at least our public understanding of the president's health (more on that below) that he should be on "aspirin therapy."
2) The pattern changes. Donald Trump is basically the most habit-bound and routine-bound man we know in American politics. And yet we've seen some major departures of his routine in recent weeks " including, not least of all, that he stuck in Washington all this weekend. Trump takes off for one of his golf resorts the first chance he can nearly every weekend of the year, and yet he's just choosing to spend an extra-long holiday weekend hanging out at the White House? Why? Is his medical team wanting to keep him closer to top secure medical facilities?
At the August 22nd Oval Office event where photos of Trump's bruised hands went viral, I was struck by something else " as Public Notice was too: The oddity of Trump appearing tie-less. In fact, all the men in the photo op are not wearing their ties, making clear that this was a coordinated decision to align with the president's sartorial choice. Trump effectively never appears in the Oval Office without a tie " remember how they berated Zelenskyy for appearing in the Oval Office without a suit earlier this year? Scroll back through the summer and there appears to be no recent precedent for the president NOT wearing a tie in the Oval Office. It also is a rare " if not unprecedented " time that he wears a hat while sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. So for this one event, one where the president's ill health appears on very public display, he and everyone else in the event, including JD Vance, chooses to go tie-less and he also wears a hat? At the very least, it would cause me to ask around about what else was going with Donald Trump on August 22nd?
