It appears that president Donald Trump's years of fast food and snack guzzling have finally caught up to him — and the entire world can tell.
During Trump's summit last week with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss finally bringing an end to the war in Ukraine, the junk food-loving president's ankles were visibly swollen to a painful-looking degree in his shiny black Oxfords.
That swelling was pronounced in the photo below, which was taken by Andrew Harnik for Getty Images and which we cropped and lightened so you can see the outline of his ankles where they were hidden by shadow.
While there's nothing all that unusual about a larger aging man developing so-called "cankles," Trump's do not appear to be the byproduct of your average weight gain.
Last month, White House physician Sean Barbabella revealed in a statement that the president had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), which occurs, Johns Hopkins notes, when leg veins struggle to pump blood back up to the heart. Instead, it pools in the legs, resulting in the swollen appearance we see on Trump. Though it's fairly common for people over the age of 70 to develop CVI, it can be exacerbated by spending a lot of time on one's feet and eating a lot of junk food — and if nothing else, this president is indeed known for his love of golfing and hamberders.
That July admission came as a reversal from another Barbabella statement back in April, when the White House doctor denied following the president's annual physical that he had anything wrong with him. Despite a viral video in March showing the president limping on the golf course, Trump's physician insisted that "blood flow to his extremities [was] unimpaired."
Though we can't be positive of the exact impetus for Barbabella's course-correction, another photo of Trump's alarming ankle swelling was taken just a day prior to the White House physician's diagnosis announcement. Shown below, that photo, which was taken by Anna Moneymaker for Getty Images, shows just how pronounced the president's cankles appeared.
Just a few days before the Trump-Putin summit — which was also attended by secretary of state Marco Rubio, who the president once maligned based on limb size — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended her boss and his health.
"Look, you see the president every day," the press secretary told reporters last week. “He’s moving, he’s working, he’s continuing, there have been no adjustments made to his lifestyle."
While it's very much in character for Trump to not change his habits after being diagnosed with a disorder that will, per the Cleveland Clinic, only get more painful if left untreated, it's very telling that the president has not taken steps to ease his condition, even as he holds important televised meetings with heads of state like Putin.
And let's not forget that despite any insistence to the contrary, Trump is 79 years old — meaning he's twice broken the record as the oldest person inaugurated to the American presidency.
The ravages of aging, of course, catch up to us all in myriad ways — a biological happenstance that Trump made sure to pound into the ground when his predecessor, president Joe Biden, began to show hints of cognitive decline towards the end of his single presidential term.
As the Daily Beast points out in a separate piece, Biden's seeming cognitive issues didn't become undeniable until he had less than a year left as commander-in-chief — and they were so pronounced that Democrats decided, far too late, to select then-vice president Kamala Harris as their nominee. Trump, by comparison, is less than two-thirds of his way through his first year back in the Oval Office — and already, he's showing unmistakable signs of health problems.
When his predecessor became too unwell to ignore, his party was forced to take action. Though Trump isn't visibly sundowning just yet, those cankles are mighty worrisome — and it seems nearly impossible to imagine this president getting into salads that aren't made in Trump Tower and feature edible bowls in enough time to reverse course.
Still, it might be time for Trump to be strong-armed into cutting out at least some of the nutrition-less drivel that makes up his diet, lest we see him doze off on camera again in what could very well have been a blood sugar crash. After all, this man has the nuclear codes.
More on Trump-style diets: Test Shows Junk Food’s Alarming Impact on Human Cognition
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