Trump's health raising alarms in Turkey

President Donald Trump displayed a bruised hand during his Tuesday trip to Turkey, which is occurring in advance of his upcoming summit at NATO. By doing so, he raised further questions about his physical health.

“Trump’s troublesome appendage has become one of the most prominent and longest-running health concerns amid an array of worrying symptoms,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Harry Thompson on Tuesday. “A neck rash has also been spotted poking out of the top of his collar, and, as was the case in Turkey, he has appeared unsteady on his feet, particularly on stairs.”

Describing Trump’s persistent swollen cankles and arguing that they are part of the same perceived series of health problems as his bruised hands, Thompson characterized Trump’s claim that these are caused by innocuous blood pooling, hand shaking and aspirin taking as dubious.

“Questions were raised over the plausibility of the latter when another bruise popped up on his left hand, too,” Thompson wrote. “Trump has also appeared to struggle to stay awake during public events, from meetings in the Oval Office to the NBA playoffs.”

Earlier this month clinical and forensic psychologist Dr. John Paul Garrison speculated that Trump’s July 4th speech revealed that he is aware of his looming mortality. This was evident, he said, by Trump’s regard for a 107-year-old American who was present at the ceremony.

“You see actual sadness on his brow, which you almost never see from President Donald Trump,” Garrison explained. “Right now he’s joking about health, but as you’re seeing, there seems to be real sadness in his eyes as he’s talking about that.”

In May, speaking with this journalist about Trump’s seeming cognitive decline, a former psychiatry professor at Tufts University said that the president’s age seems to be catching up with him.

“There has been a frightening progression of symptoms,” Dr. Henry Abraham, the chief signatory of a letter to Congress warning about Trump’s perceived cognitive decline, told AlterNet. “These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war. As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say Yikes!”

Also in May psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee, formerly of Yale University, argued that Trump is showing troubling symptoms such as “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings”; “grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility, imagery of himself as Pope suggestive of a divine mission, being a mythical warrior hero, depicting himself as combat pilot—dropping feces on civilians, and claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited—with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his ‘own morality’”; and “severely impaired judgment and impulse control, reflected in reckless threats of violence, advocacy of lethal force against civilians, encouragement of extrajudicial actions by armed supporters, repeated threats and often actions—judicial, prosecutorial, police, military, and by invoking emergency powers—against political opponents and others who disagree with him.”