Armchair diagnosis

There's intense interest in the blogosphere and Bluesky in the physical and mental health of Cheeto Benito, although the corporate media, including the New York Times, suddenly and completely lost all interest in the question of presidential health and capacity when Joe Biden decided not to seek reelection. Up until that exact second it was the single most urgent issue facing the nation. Very strange.

 

Anyway, I'm not a real doctor, I'm a doctor of philosophy, but in this situation that gives me an advantage. I'm not bound by official medical ethics, which make M.D.s highly reticent about proposing diagnoses for people they have not personally examined. First, what is pretty clear is that Cheeto has heart failure. That accounts for the swollen legs, the slow halting gait and the lack of stamina. You may have noticed that he is now doing his increasingly infrequent public appearances sitting down. He also has significant osteoarthritis, which is pretty much inevitable for a man his age. His hunched posture also suggests osteopenia All of this adds up to a substantial risk of falling, which could easily put him in a nursing home with a hip or lumbar fracture. However, it isn't likely to kill him any time soon -- people can live a long time with those conditions.

The swollen, discolored hands are a bit of a mystery. The swelling could be from heart failure, although the hands are not usually affected in that way. The discoloration is not as obvious to me as it seems to be to some people, but I'll believe it's there. I do not agree with the frequently seen assertion that this is the result of some sort of IV infusion. Skillful venipuncture does not normally produce bruising or swelling, and if it did, they wouldn't do it on his hands where the result would be visible. It's conceivable that this is Kaposi sarcoma, but he wouldn't ordinarily be at risk for that unless he's immunocompromised for some reason. However, it would also explain the swollen hands and contribute to the swollen legs.

 

That would also explain why he has apparently gotten whole body imaging. If he is receiving lecanemab to slow the progress of Alzeheimer's, that would explain MRI imaging of his head, but not the rest of his body. Kaposi or some other form of cancer would explain the whole body CT scan that he apparently recently received. Whatever is going on, he's obviously in bad shape, but again, all this won't necessarily kill him very soon.

Mentally, of course we know that he has a severe personality disorder -- narcissism and psychopathy, severe enough to distort his perception of reality. I do not actually believe that his manifest dementia is Alzheimer's, I think it's a form of frontotemporal dementia, which is manifest in his loss of executive function and the exaggeration of his pre-existing personality traits. It's also steadily eroding his vocabulary and causing him to perseverate on a limited range of ideas. This is progressing slowly however and again, he can probably live with it for a while, although his behavior will grow increasingly erratic.

 

As I always say, I don't make predictions, but I will say in this case that it's likely to just slowly get worse, but slowly enough that the New York Times will never notice. The possibility of a catastrophe is there at any time, however.  So don't hold your breath.