What did Donald Trump do today?

He did just about everything he could to make people question his health and judgment.

At midnight Thursday morning, Trump was where he's spent most of the last two weeks: his private resort in Florida. As usual, his right hand was pasted over with makeup that doesn't match his skin tone, to cover up a bruise he claims is from shaking hands. That explanation, which the White House continues to gamely offer reporters who ask about it, doesn't explain why Trump has recently been wearing concealer on his left hand, or why he's needed adhesive bandages to cover the spot where an IV for some undisclosed infusion would go.

But today, Trump had more news about his health—none of it good. The Wall Street Journal posted a long article today detailing his various health struggles and his increasingly obvious decline in energy and cognitive fitness, as well as the effort to portray him as healthy and fit. As is typical for such stories, the reporters asked the White House for comment before publishing, and were surprised when Trump made himself available for questions. 

In the course of the impromptu interview that followed, Trump blamed his hand bruising on his aspirin regimen, saying that he takes 325mg per day in order to get "nice, thin blood pouring through my heart — does that make sense?" From a medical standpoint, it doesn't. Daily aspirin is almost never prescribed anymore for people who have not already had a cardiac incident, even people whose heart health is suspect, like Trump admits his is. And when daily aspirin is indicated, the dose is 81mg, not 325. 

In other words, Trump says he is taking aspirin explicitly against doctors' orders, and four times the dose that would be recommended even if that were a good idea.

He also tried to retroactively downgrade the mysterious MRI that reporters learned he'd undergone last fall to a CT scan. When news of the MRI broke, he claimed he didn't know what it was for—something almost impossible to believe, as MRIs are never done unless a physician is trying to confirm or rule out a specific and serious health issue. But some drug regimens, notably Alzheimers drugs like Leqembi, do require an MRI to ensure they're not causing dangerous brain swelling or fluid buildup.

As is often the case, it's not clear whether Trump was confused then or lying now, although it's worth noting that even if Trump didn't know the difference between an MRI and a CT scan, his doctors and staff would, and could have corrected the record earlier.

Trump said the lesson he'd learned from all this was, in so many words, not to tell people about future medical procedures. "In retrospect, it’s too bad I took it because it gave them a little ammunition. I would have been a lot better off if they didn’t, because the fact that I took it said, ‘Oh gee, is something wrong?’ Well, nothing’s wrong.”

Trump, who handed over control of the nation's public health and medical regulatory agencies to a devotee of pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories, is full of unusual ideas about health. When the COVID-19 epidemic broke, he publicly suggested using household cleansers and veterinary deworming agents as a drug therapy. And he unironically believes an 18th-century theory that exercise is bad for the body because it uses up the finite amount of energy a person is born with.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents who can't be honest about their health (or simply can't remember what it is) aren't healthy enough to serve. 

• Someone who gets and then ignores the best medical advice in the world on matters that might kill them is also unfit, although more on grounds of stupidity or narcissism.