Image by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty / Futurism Treatments
Over the past few months, a small media circus has ignited after the White House announced that 79-year-old president Donald Trump, who had been photographed with swollen ankles, had been diagnosed with a disorder called chronic venous insufficiency that causes blood to pool in the extremities.
Now, amid the increasing scrutiny about those "cankles," it appears the president or his aides are obfuscating another visible ailment — this time on his hand.
As flagged by the Daily Beast, Trump was spotted on Friday with what appears to be a thick patina of light-colored foundation slathered haphazardly onto his right hand. As you can see from the photo below from Getty photographer Chip Somodevilla, the makeup was a totally different color than the president's own ruddy skin tone, and because whoever put it on him didn't blend it at all, it stood out like the first splash of a Jackson Pollock painting.
For months now, Trump has been seen on-and-off wearing a drag queen-level layer of makeup on his right hand to cover what has sometimes appeared to be a large and gnarly bruise. (White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted back in February, when the discoloration first made headlines, that the president's bruising comes from his love of hand-shaking.)
After he was caught sporting that thick layer of coverup this past Friday, Leavitt suggested again that Trump was suffering a minor hand-shaking injury.
"President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history," the press secretary said in a statement. "His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day."
Around the same time he was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency in July, Leavitt again blamed the bruise on the president's penchant for shaking hands, but that time, she added a bit of a twist.
"This [bruising] is consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin, which is taken as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen," the press secretary said during a July 17 briefing, citing the White House physician. "This is a well-known and benign side effect of aspirin therapy. And the President remains in excellent health, which I think all of you witness on a daily basis here."
To be fair, taking aspirin regularly is indeed known to cause people to bruise and get cut more easily, which suggests, at very least, that the press secretary and the White House physician aren't fibbing on that front.
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