Donald Trump’s triglycerides are 129. His fasting blood glucose is 89. His alanine transaminase is 27. He’s fine. He seems to be hewing to norms, for once.
But to hear the presidential physician tell it, Trump is bionic. In a news conference, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson hailed Trump’s health as “excellent” eight times. He padded his encomium with steroidal intensifiers. Incredibly. Exceptionally. Hands down. He sounded awestruck: “He has incredibly good genes, and it’s just the way God made him.”
It was chilling to hear a doctor underscore Trump’s oft-expressed faith in his own genetic superiority. When Trump himself gives this “good genes” spiel, it often dovetails with his broader ideology of white supremacy. But more shuddery still was hearing Jackson pipe Trump’s special brand of overheated self-congratulation.
We know this plot by now: A man of apparent self-possession disappears into an examining room or a golf cart with the president — and comes out hollow-eyed, body-snatched and programmed with Trump’s own pieties.
Earlier this month, the journalist Maggie Haberman tweeted, “Three Trump advisors have commented privately at various points that people around him/close to him begin to act like him.” This phenomenon goes for the media too. As Katy Waldman wrote in Slate: “Trump’s tics continue to seep into the way we write and speak, whether we think we’re being ironic or just can’t help ventriloquizing the man on everyone’s mind. We’re all the puppet.”
Sure, there are those lost souls who take up the full bow-and-scrape routine: Vice President Mike Pence, attorney Michael Cohen, Don Jr., some in the Cabinet. Hope for them is gone. But what of the less likely Trump imitators who have forfeited actual dignity to act like him? One year ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no one’s idea of a pushover, threw over his establishment Hebrew in favor of Trump’s cloying imbecility. “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”
Similarly, as Trump was getting close to President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi of Egypt in the fall, the Egyptian government waxed Trumpian to mark a deadly attack on a mosque in the Sinai: “As usual, deplorable @CNN coverage of Sinai tragedy today. Anchor more interested in reporters access to Sinai than in those who lost their lives!!!”
Trump almost certainly counts the rhetorical subordination of these men as a win. After all, he devised his interpersonal strategies in the 1970s, when mentally dominating others was considered a fine art. The manual for “corporate warfare” in those days was “Power!” by Michael Korda, who ran in Trump’s circles.
