Trumpty Dumpty and His Toe Pads

Trump’s contemptibility has nothing to do with his personal appearance or hygiene, and everything to do with his psychology, his behavior, and his politics, in my opinion. But, hey, I, too, love a good-humored political pile-on for someone so richly deserving as Trump, so… toe pads!

Speculation is rife around this image of the little platforms that Trump was standing on at a recent event. The search has been on for other images of Trump using this prop. The speculation is that Trump’s notorious forward lean has become so bad that he has to compensate using these doodads.

Now the circle is completed with the latest ‘smelly’ rumor by tying these disparate symptoms together as characteristic symptoms of a single medical diagnosis, which I only offer for amusement purposes since I’m not a doctor, and no doctor would diagnose without an examination of the patient.

Such a forward lean, formally called camptocormia, is a common indicator of Frontotemporal Dementia, symptoms of which have been linked to Trump’s behavior and appearance as early as 2015 by even reputable publications such as Psychology Today:

The other symptoms of such dementia certainly seem to coincide very nicely with Trump’s public behavior. The most common symptoms of frontotemporal dementia involve extreme changes in behavior and personality that seem to coincide very nicely with Trump’s own. These include:

• Increasingly inappropriate social behavior.
• Loss of empathy and other interpersonal skills. For example, not being sensitive to another person’s feelings.
• Lack of judgment.
• Loss of inhibition.
• Lack of interest, also known as apathy. Apathy can be mistaken for depression.
• Compulsive behaviors such as tapping, clapping, or smacking lips over and over.
• A decline in personal hygiene.
• Changes in eating habits. People with FTD typically overeat or prefer to eat sweets and carbohydrates…

This degenerative neurological condition can also cause characteristic changes in speech patterns that many are claiming they have detected in Trump in recent years:

• Increasing trouble using and understanding written and spoken language. People with FTD may not be able to find the right word to use in speech.
• Trouble naming things. People with FTD may replace a specific word with a more general word, such as using “it” for pen.
• No longer knowing word meanings.
• Having hesitant speech that may sound telegraphic by using simple, two-word sentences.
• Making mistakes in sentence building.

If you have ever forced yourself to listen to the word salad that is a Trump rally speech, you will note many features of the above in Trump’s ramblings.

Trump displays other physical symptoms of neurodegenerative disease including limb weakness, such as the weakness evident in Trump’s arms in clips like this one from a CSpan of his inability to lift a glass to his mouth without both arms.

Trump also has difficulty with his walking gait. As Trump walks down the White House driveway to meet the press here in a video from his Presidency, you see a clear example of the inability to gain adequate clearance for the right foot to swing normally. To compensate, he abducts his thigh and swings the leg in a semicircle: This is the circumducted gait, or spastic hemiparesis, the most common abnormal gait in neurology. Other photos show his right foot turned in, or inverted, which is part of the hemiparetic gait.

So, Trump may not just be a bumbling sad sack of crap, a diarrhea-mouthed lout, a sociopathic shit for brains, a leaning tower of moron, or just a smelly old man who is losing his marbles, but may be irreversibly neurologically impaired. Trump being such an offensive pile of steaming shit may not be his fault at all. He could be simply in steep neurological decline as a natural and unfortunate part of his rapid neurological decline due to dementia.

But what does it say about the 30-40% of Americans who still worship and adore every utterance of such an obviously stinking and sick stew of neuronal offal poured into an ill-fitting suit? And their constant representations of this shambling mound of lard and hatred as some sort of uber-Mensch superhero figure? Over-compensating much, MAGA folks?