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The occasion was a video clip. It shows the 79 year old with his eyes closed while Interior Secretary Doug Burgum spoke about classifying coal as a critical mineral. Trump once again appeared to be fighting to remain conscious in the Oval Office. Reiner agreed that the president had nodded off and attached a warning when sharing the footage. \u201cA striking omission in the president\u2019s recent medical examination is any mention of his sleep disorder,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThis is not normal.\u201d Already last month he told CNN that the president was suffering from severe daytime sleepiness, which he described as a serious medical condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The scene deserves close attention because it contains more than an anecdote. While Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin attacked former President Joe Biden\u2019s administration for trying to regulate the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, the president leaned sideways in his chair, blinked for extended moments, and at times rolled his head upward. As Burgum spoke, he appeared to doze in another posture, bent forward over the desk, hands in his lap, eyes firmly closed, even at the moment when the 69 year old thanked the president for opening coal to greater trade. It is the image of a court praising sleep, an assembly in which servants celebrate the vigor of a man who no longer hears them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The occasion itself was coal. Using emergency powers from the Cold War under the Defense Production Act of 1950, the president directed millions into American coal plants and coal exports to Asia, according to available figures: 425 million dollars for upgrades at thirteen coal plants and 75 million dollars for the West Gateway export terminal in Oakland. Over this effort to keep the past alive, the man who ordered it fell asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Concern about sleep does not stand alone. His late night outbursts on his own Truth Social network suggest that in April he failed to sleep through the night on eighty three out of one hundred days. After a visit to Walter Reed Military Hospital on May 26, his physicians released a detailed report with many figures, but sleep was nowhere mentioned. Added to this is that after his third visit to Walter Reed within thirteen months, the president disappeared from public view for a week, fueling concern that something serious might be involved. The White House dismissed that and stated that he was in excellent health for his age. His personal physician Sean Barbabella wrote in a memorandum that the president weighed around 108 kilograms, approximately six kilograms more than the previous year, and that his resting heart rate had increased from 62 to 73 beats per minute. \u201cThe president remains current on all recommended preventive screenings and vaccinations,\u201d Barbabella wrote. \u201cRoutine cancer screening, cardiovascular risk assessment, and metabolic evaluations are current and within recommended intervals. Preventive counseling was provided, including dietary guidance, a recommendation to take low dose aspirin, increase physical activity, and continue weight loss.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reiner remained concerned afterward. \u201cGiven the continuing concerns following the recent examination and the president\u2019s extended absence from public view, the White House should make the personal physician available for questions from the press,\u201d he said. The White House responded combatively. \u201cIf it quacks like a duck, maybe it\u2019s just another partisan Democratic doctor,\u201d spokesman Davis Ingle said. The president was \u201cthe sharpest, most accessible, and most energetic president in American history,\u201d and all of the alleged medical professionals engaging in remote diagnoses for political reasons were obviously violating the Hippocratic Oath they had sworn. Earlier, when asked about the moment of dozing during Burgum\u2019s remarks, Ingle had used the same formula and added that while the newspaper\u2019s \u201cglue sniffing reporters\u201d spread baseless conspiracy theories, the president was working around the clock to make the country greater than ever before. There is a peculiar comedy in describing a man as working around the clock while, at that very hour, his eyes are closing and calling him the most energetic in history while the footage shows the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What remains is the thought beneath all of this, and it concerns not the aging man but the apparatus around him. Since ancient times, people have distinguished in the ruler two bodies: the body of office, which neither tires nor dies, and the body of the person, who ages like everyone else. There is nothing shameful in a body that grows tired, because everyone does, and on June 14 the president turns eighty. What is shameful is only the machinery that denies one body in order to invoke the other, that produces a medical report recording everything except what the cameras show, and that drowns out silence about sleep with noise about vigor. Whoever holds immense power owes people clarity about the condition of the hand holding it. Closed eyes in the Oval Office are not the offense. The offense is claiming they are open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n