So Dr Sean Conley, the physician to the President, has issued a statement. President Trump’s health is, we are told, ‘excellent’. His cognitive tests are ‘normal’. His cardiovascular performance is ‘outstanding’. This, of course, is the same Dr Conley who, during the President’s bout with COVID-19, gave us such gems as ‘the President is doing very well’ while the man was gasping for oxygen in a military hospital. Forgive me if I do not uncork the champagne just yet.
We have seen this play before. The official medical bulletin is rarely a document of sober clinical fact. It is a political instrument, a spear carved from the wood of public relations. When King George III was ‘mad’, his physicians said he was merely ‘bilious’. When Woodrow Wilson lay paralysed after a stroke, his wife and doctor ran the government for eighteen months. The White House medical office is not an independent arbiter of truth; it is the final layer of the imperial paint.
The timing is almost too exquisite. The President faces a crowded field of challengers, legal troubles, and a public that increasingly questions his fitness. What better way to silence the whispers than to trot out a white-coated authority who swears on a stack of stethoscopes that the man is a physical marvel? It is the oldest trick in the autocratic book: the controlled disclosure, the selective transparency.
And yet, the scepticism is not without warrant. Dr Conley’s statement is notably short on specifics. No raw test results. No independent verification. Just a glowing narrative. This is medicine as mythmaking. The President is not merely healthy; he is ‘excellent’. He is not merely fit for office; he is a paragon of vigour. It is the language of the courtier, not the clinician.
We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where facts are subservient to narratives. The Victorians had their quack doctors promising elixirs of life. We have official pronouncements that would make P.T. Barnum blush. The tragedy is that a nation of 330 million people is expected to take this as gospel, simply because it comes from the West Wing.
One must ask: if the President’s health is so unassailable, why the need for a press release? Why the defensive posture? A truly healthy leader does not require a medical endorsement every time a poll drops. The protest is too loud. It betrays an insecurity that no number of clean bills can cure.
Critics call it a PR stunt. They are right. But the deeper worry is not the stunt itself. It is that we have become a society that accepts such stunts as normal. The line between governance and performance has dissolved. The President is an actor reading lines written by his handlers, and his doctor is a supporting player. This is not the Rome of Cicero and Cato. This is the Rome of Nero and his lyre.
The real question, the one that pricks at the conscience of every thinking citizen, is this: what are they not telling us? Because if the health report is a work of fiction, then the truth must be worse than we imagine. The Fall of empires does not begin with a single battle. It begins with a single lie, repeated until no one remembers the truth.
