What did Donald Trump do today?

He got health care, of an unspecified sort, while others lost theirs.

Trump visited Walter Reed Medical Center today for what the White House described as a routine physical—his second in less than six months. 

It is, to be blunt, unlikely that this is the real reason. Even if Trump, who is 79, required routine health monitoring more often than once a year, that could be and historically has been done without requiring the president to visit a hospital.

Trump has manifested a wide range of troubling physical and cognitive symptoms during his second term, when he has been well enough to appear in public at all. Although his staff denies it, he has almost certainly been receiving intravenous drug infusions, as evidenced by the telltale bruise on the back of his hand that he has tried to conceal by slathering makeup on it. He's suffering from severe edema in his lower extremities, which the White House eventually admitted to after photographs of grossly his swollen ankles made the news. He's frequently had difficulty staying awake during the day, and while he is spending more weekends than ever at one of his private golf courses, there's less evidence than before that he's actually playing golf, which would require at least some mobility. That may be because Trump is having difficulty walking in a straight line, something that was painfully obvious as he staggered from one side of a red carpet to the other during a recent meeting with Vladimir Putin. 

It's clear that Trump's physical wellness is an increasing source of concern to him. He has, very uncharacteristically, started talking about his place in the afterlife, volunteering his belief that if he accomplishes certain goals while in office, he'll be able to get into heaven. He's also become defensive about his increasingly obvious frailty, at one point showing jealousy about how the younger and fitter President Obama would run down stairs, rather than slowly and cautiously lowering himself down them as Trump does.

Of course, physical deterioration is simply a natural part of aging, and not in and of itself a problem for the presidency. The mounting evidence of Trump's cognitive decline is another matter. Just in the last few months, he's fallen for AI scams, announced a "new" policy he'd forgotten about in the few months since the last time he announced it, forgotten which countries were involved in the "wars" he claims to have ended, forgotten about a major military operation from his first term, accused pharmaceutical companies of conspiring to cover up good news about vaccines, and gotten confused about whether his TV was "lying to him," among other things.

Trump took advantage of his unlimited access to taxpayer-funded healthcare on the same day that federal health workers received layoff notices from the Department of Health and Human Services. According to HHS, these layoffs are related to the ongoing government shutdown over Trump's refusal to fund health insurance premiums. These workers are the first federal employees to lose their jobs since Trump's recent threat to fire people in "popular Democrat programs"—by which he apparently meant healthcare.

Why does this matter?

• All Americans deserve health care of the quality—and quantity—that Donald Trump is getting.