I have been a person with an awareness of the existence of Donald J Trump since about 1980. A person who had previous such awareness, I believe, was my father, Dr Peter Bry. Over the past 39 years (don’t ask me about math, please), I am (or grammatical continuity) pleased to report that Mr Trump has exhibited no significant medical problems.
At least, no significant physical medical problems.
Mr Trump has had a complete medical examination that showed only positive results. In fact, the word “positive” doesn’t really capture the positivity of these results. I would describe them, rather, as “astonishingly excellent”, if you’ll allow me to use technical medical terminology. Astonishingly excellent, much like the results of the latest national poll conducted by Monmouth University, in which 41% of voters identifying as Republicans or independents leaning Republican said they preferred Mr Trump to any of his rivals.
Monmouth University, to answer a question posed by Mr Trump himself – “what is a Monmouth?!” – is a private university with some 4,400 students located in West Long Branch, New Jersey, very close to where I grew up. I visited there on a class trip around 1980, about the same time I was learning about who Donald Trump was, while John Huston was filming his screen adaptation of the famous play Annie in a huge mansion on campus that was once called Shadow Lawn but is now known as Woodrow Wilson Hall, because famous racist Woodrow Wilson used to summer there when he was president of the United States in the early 20th century.
But enough about me, and racism. More results from Mr Trump’s recent complete medical examination: Mr Trump’s physical strength and stamina are extraordinary. Simply extraordinary. “Preternatural” might be a better word. Do you remember a few years ago, when everyone was sending those jokes around about B-level martial arts action movie star Chuck Norris’s superpowers? It’s like that, but in real life. When Mr Trump does a push-up he isn’t lifting himself up, he is pushing the earth down. I state this in my capacity as a doctor. I mean, as someone who has known who Donald J Trump is since 1980.
If elected, I can state unequivocally that Mr Trump will be the healthiest person ever elected to the presidency. How can I state this unequivocally, without having examined any of the previous 44 human beings who have taken the office? That’s easy. I do not know what the word “unequivocal” means. I am a doctor, not a linguist. Wait a minute. I am not even a doctor. I keep forgetting.
Donald Trump’s doctor, the man who conducted (apparently?) the recent complete medical examination and reports its astonishingly excellent findings, is a man named Harold Bornstein. He works at Lenox Hill hospital and keeps an office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He looks like Joe Walsh from the Eagles, and I would be surprised if he did not know how to play at least a few Eagles songs on the guitar.
I used to go to a doctor who kept a shabby little office on the Upper East Side and affected a notably “groovy” look not unlike that of Dr Bornstein. My doctor’s last name was Bernstein. (They are both Irish, I think.)
I won’t go into greater specifics, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. But if you ever want to find a doctor who talks more about the sailboat he sails around the Long Island Sound every Wednesday than anything else, and maybe sort-of hits on your wife when she goes to see him, and prescribes you these crazy barbituates called Butalbital that induce an extremely enjoyable state of euphoria while making you walk sideways and erasing large swaths of your memory, and also misdiagnoses you with an unequivocal heart murmur only to be very embarrassed after you go see a cardiac specialist who tells you, after two weeks of abject fear, that your heart is actually fine and he has no idea what might have indicated the original, wrong diagnosis, well, that kind of doctor is available on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Sometimes you might want that kind of doctor. Although subsequent doctors may warn you to stay away from Butalbital because it’s “Valley of the Dolls stuff” – the difference in dosage between pleasantly effective and potentially lethal is dangerously slight.
This type of doctor might be willing to write a really ridiculously enthusiastic report after a recent complete medical examination. At least about your state of physical health. This doctor would have no expertise in assessing your state of mental health. So he would have no way of assessing whether your inclination to, let’s say, make grandiose, self-serving, often racist and xenophobic statements with seemingly no regard for the truth or consequences might indicate, say, “textbook narcissistic personality disorder”.
For that, you’d have to go see someone like my father, Peter Bry, who became aware of the existence of Donald J Trump even before I did. He was a psychologist.
