For months now, the internet has been consumed with the question of Donald Trump’s bruises. A large bluish green patch has been noticed on the back of Trump’s right hand since the spring of 2024, but the bruise became especially prominent after an enterprising photographer took close-ups of it at a meeting between Trump and Emmanuel Macron in February. The speculation about Trump’s health reached a fever pitch this past weekend, when Trump disappeared from public view for a several days. The internet concluded that he was dead.
Of course the internet considers anyone it cannot see to be not alive, but this was a special case. At least half the country and a majority of the planet wishes, it seems, that Trump would pass on to his final transaction. Unlike during his first term, when the comedian Kathy Griffin posted a photograph of herself holding a replica of Trump’s severed head – thus destroying her career – few people now, even privately, even jokingly, want to be overheard wishing the US president harm. The atmosphere of masked Ice agents, military troops policing American cities, vindictive edicts being passed from on high – investigations, threatened indictments, the removal of security details – is growing too intimate. But the deep and widespread hatred of this American leader is unprecedented.
There is almost a poetic justice in the fact that Trump’s body, his biological state, as it were, is now as much a focus of the country’s attention as any aspect of his stated policies or personal behaviour. Biology takes precedence when existential dread proliferates, and both the right and the left have long been practising a biological reductionism. With its obsessions with race and gender, the left has all but displaced culture with biology. Trump has multiplied this trend many times over with his references to immigrants poisoning American “blood”, and immigrants raping and killing, and his doom-laden vision of American cities – liberal American cities, that is – putting the people who live there at constant physical risk. Robert F Kennedy Jr’s manic and equally dark vision of the US administrative state using vaccines to make war on American bodies is part of this.
No surprise then that Trump wants to change the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War”. This Hobbesian president, who sees all of life as perpetual combat, is in fact no kind of Hobbesian at all. For Hobbes, a nation invested power in its sovereign to keep society from descending into the “war of all against all” that results from a state of nature. This American sovereign is using the power of the state to foment a state of nature, in which the spectre of a war of all against all is what sustains his power, resting as it does on his promises to prevent what he is actually causing.
There is a clear sense, though, in which the Hobbesian vision of society distressingly applies to what is happening in the US now. Hobbes compared his theoretical political state to the human body; and the analogies he draws from that model, as confusing as they sometimes are, present a biological picture of society. Of most interest is his comparison of a society’s laws, what he calls “the terror of punishments and the hope of rewards”, to a human body’s nerves. Whether it was the left dragging the country through two failed and wholly unnecessary impeachments of Trump during his first term – now impeachment would be a blessing – or Trump wielding the justice system irrationally and excessively to deport, take revenge, impose tariffs, America’s nervous system is being stretched to the breaking point by attempts to use the law for ideological, or personal, ends. It is fitting that before the wonder drug Ozempic, there was the wonder drug gabapentin, still widely used, which diffuses its analgesic, sedative and euphoric effects entirely through the body’s nervous system. In 2019, there were 73 million prescriptions written for it in the US.
To some extent, people’s sense of their physical being reflects the material manifestation of their leader, especially in a democratic culture like America’s where personal identity is fluid and in a state of constant exchange. (Walt Whitman: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”) American gym culture, its quest for the perfect body, began in the 1980s, when an unleashed consumerism found its physical and political embodiment in the Hellenic Ronald Reagan. It continued through Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama. With the advent of Trump, Joe Biden and the flowering, as it were, of an American gerontocracy, the country’s self-image is in a different place.
The country’s rising sense of hopelessness, its literal descent into clinical depression – nearly 30 per cent of American adults had been diagnosed with it in at some point in their lives – is reflected in the rotting biologies of its two most recent leaders. We know now – though some of us knew years ago – that Biden was deteriorating before the country’s blinded eyes. Trump’s mental state, his bizarre flights of dissociation, his repeated references to Al Capone have been both occasions for nihilistic merriment among his supporters and five-alarm terror for his opponents. Just this week, America’s leader responded to the summit meeting in Beijing between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un like an insecure primary-schooler excluded from the cool table in the cafeteria, writing on Truth Social: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as you conspire against The United States of America.” On the evidence of his behaviour, the dilapidated state of Trump’s brain is incredible.
This is why the rotting skin on the back of his right hand is so mesmerising. It is the physical correlative, not just to his mental decline, but to the national desiccation into divisiveness and despair. That it is the right hand of a man who has spent his life greedily grabbing money and “pussy” lends an air of tragic inexorability to the whole thing. Whatever the reasons for that blue patch, the historically sudden onset of American putrefaction will not end well.
[See also: Donald Trump is creating a personal paramilitary force]
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