Impervious as ever to irony, Donald Trump is trying to weaponize his opponent’s medical records against her while staunchly refusing to release his own.
In his latest unhinged tirade on Truth Social, the former president posted on Monday that he’s “far healthier than Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, but especially, Kamala,” adding that he is naturally “far too busy campaigning to take the time” to, you know, prove it.
His comments come amid mounting pressure to provide evidence of his physical and mental health, not least after a letter was released on Sunday by Doctors for Harris, a group of pro-Democratic medical professionals, warning “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”
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The Republican nominee followed up his post with a bitterly personal attack drawing on Harris’ own, dutifully-released doctor’s report to speculate about her fitness for public office.
“I have just seen Kamala’s Report, and it is not good,” Trump wrote. “She suffers from ‘urticaria’, defined as ‘a rash of round, red welts on the skin that itch intensely, sometimes with dangerous swelling.’”
“She also has ‘allergic rhinitis’ and ‘allergic conjunctivitis’, a very messy and dangerous situation. These are deeply serious conditions that clearly impact her functioning,” he added. “Maybe that is why she can’t answer even the simplest of questions asked by 60 Minutes, and others.”
Urticaria, otherwise known as hives, is an uncomfortable but exceptionally common and usually harmless condition, thought to affect up to 20 percent of people at some point in their lives. Allergic rhinitis and conjunctivitis, meanwhile, are broad terms referring to irritation of the nose and eyes caused by minor allergens, like pollen.
In short, and as the full text of the report from Harris’ doctor attests, the Democratic candidate occasionally suffers from seasonal allergies, and otherwise “remains in excellent health.”
It’s little wonder the question of medical records has made Trump tetchy, with the tenor of his recent Truth Social posts alone perhaps evidencing just how spectacularly his campaign’s initially winning strategy of focusing on age and cognitive ability has now backfired following Joe Biden’s shock withdrawal from the race in July.
This is also, after all, the man who previously dictated a letter from his doctor claiming he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
