Two years ago, give or take, the US election seemed to hang on the health of the candidates. A video surfaced of Hillary Clinton, seeming to wobble and almost faint as she got into a car. Your head said: this is trivial thing, if it were serious she would have bowed out, it’s probably one of those diseases like labyrinthitis or flu that you don’t believe exists until you get it yourself. Your gut said: this is very bad, voting is primal; no one lines up behind anyone who looks as though they’re about to fall over.
Trump, meanwhile, was in rude health, which was plain from his overall rudeness, and also, a letter from his physician, Dr Harold Bornstein. It was like a note you forge from your mum, in reverse: Donald Trump can go swimming, because he is in the best health ever, his level of wellbeing is unlike any you may have encountered in a swim-eligible child. It turns out there was a reason. “He dictated the whole thing,” Borstein told CNN on Tuesday. “I just made it up as I went along,” he unclarified, but I think we can call this an idiomatic US/UK difference: over there, the phrase clearly means: “I wrote down what that other person was saying.”
Dig into the text, and this much is obvious: his physical strength and stamina were “extraordinary”. “If elected,” Bornstein made up as he went along, “Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Healthier than Obama, who could shoot hoops while smoking; healthier than Kennedy, who could fry eggs just by looking at them with his vigorous eyes. “The healthiest ever” may have been the red flag, but the dead giveaway was the “astonishingly excellent”. There can never have been any real doubt that, as Bornstein now admits, “Trump dictated the letter and I’d tell him what he couldn’t put in there.” Ah history, you tantalising discipline. I would give all the ancient pots of Mesopotamia to know what Trump said that couldn’t go in. “He is so healthy that all my medical mind struggles to believe he is human, and not of the gods.” It’s given us all a laugh, except the doctor; he may just be struck off for making false statements. Wherever he ends up, it will be somewhere below “qualified and respected physician with a license to practise”.
In what should – given his astonishing good health – become his band name when he remakes himself as a global rock star, Ye Shall Know Trump By His Trail of Indictments. In the investigation into Russian links, Robert Mueller has already secured a series of guilty pleas: Michael Flynn (former national security adviser), George Papadopoulos (former campaign adviser), Richard Pinedo (a “private citizen”, which I think is code for “all-purpose rich person”) and Dutch attorney, Alex van der Zwaan, who has already served 30 days in prison and been fined $20,000. It must, from the inside, look like a game of musical chairs, again in reverse; if you can get out of the one that situates you anywhere near Donald Trump in time, you’ll be OK. This is not how the law sees it. Painstaking and a little pedantic, it will go after anyone who has ever been implicated in anything, starting with the low-hanging fruit. By the time it gets to the high-hanging fruit, its appetite is often sated. After the Watergate scandal, 69 government officials were charged, and 48 of them found guilty. President Nixon was not among them. Their sentences (some as high as 40 years) were a lot longer than the prison time they served (mostly a couple of months), but that’s not the point; the point – for foot soldiers, collaborators, loyal colluders – is that you’re all going down. If you got out today, it wouldn’t be soon enough, but it would be sooner than tomorrow.
In local elections, no one wins, especially the local electorate
Ah, local elections: the world’s most unwinnable contest. If you are the party of government, you’re expected to do badly, but there’s always a psephologist somewhere who’ll come out of the woodwork tosay you shouldn’t have done as badly as this. If you are the party of opposition, you’re expected to do well, but there will always be a decade in someone’s memory when you did better and still didn’t win the general election, and somehow polite opinion will immediately congregate around the truism that you should wipe that smile off your face because you won’t win where it counts. If you’re neither of those parties, everyone will ask why you’re standing, unless you don’t, in which case they’ll ask why you’ve given up.
As if that weren’t dispiriting enough, you are competing for offices of state in which the only real power vested is to enact the will of the government which – if the government’s will is to strip local areas of any cash they may have had the power to allocate – is a thankless task for which “lack of thanks” will probably be the best-case scenario once your period of office grinds to an end.
And when it’s all over, everyone always claims to divine some message from it, which this year will be more vexing than ever; whatever the “triumph”, leavers and remainers will both fashion it into an amorphous victory for themselves, a fundamentally inconsequential one, except if the consequence is to annoy each other, as we’re all already managing quite well.
And yet, if these are the elections in which to send a message, what a mountain of messages there are: a message against the Windrush scandal, against voter ID, against standing in a stupid way with your legs apart. It’s worth it for that. Even if it is raining.
Size of our climate problem is brought close to home
The Thwaites glacier in west Antarctica will melt, over the coming generation, unless urgent action is identified in time to save it. Being the size of Britain, that could push the sea level up a metre and a half. There was a time when bad things were the size of football pitches. Then they were the size of Wales. This is the first time that I can think of that the anything untoward has been as large as our whole land mass. What is it going to take for us to start calling it a climate crisis, rather than a change?
