Presidential Surrender

When a skeptic doesn't want to know why.

President Trump had an MRI recently at Walter Reed. He says he doesn’t know what it was for.

This is a man who demands to see the long-form birth certificate. Who interrogates the FBI, the Federal Reserve, the weather forecast. Who treats every briefing like a deposition and every expert like a hostile witness. But apparently when they said, “Mr. President, we’re going to slide you into a metal tube the size of a culvert pipe for twenty minutes,” he just said sure, fine, whatever you say, doc.

Presidents have a long history of hiding their health from the public—Wilson’s stroke, FDR’s paralysis, Eisenhower’s heart attack, Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. But Trump’s claiming not to know? That’s a new category: voluntary ignorance as a form of plausible deniability.

For someone who prides himself on refusing to take anything on faith, and who gleefully scorns the norms of the presidency and public life, this is an extraordinary act of acquiescence. Wouldn’t you ask why? Out of curiosity. Out of fear. What’s so wrong that they have to put me into that? Especially if they’d interrupted your afternoon to drive you out to the hospital for this particular indignity?

I’ve been in that tube three times. The first time was particularly difficult. I’m not claustrophobic, but twenty minutes in that tube nearly broke me.

Before they roll you in like a knife in the cutlery drawer, they give you a red button, so that if you can’t handle being encased in a tube of metal, you can ask them to release you.

Someone told me not to open my eyes and I didn’t for a very long time, but then I couldn’t hold off my curiosity any longer. I opened my eyes. The fuselage was right there. I could touch it with my tongue.

I’ve never had a more acute struggle between my lizard brain which was screaming “get me the hell out of here,” and my executive function brain which was saying that I had to endure the ordeal to get an answer. I had the means to my own freedom in my hand.

And it’s not like the challenge goes away. The jackhammering sound of the MRI sounds like they’re removing the sidewalk on Walnut Street, so you can’t exactly slip into a reverie. Your arms are pinned to your sides. And suddenly you need to scratch your nose more desperately than you’ve ever needed anything.

For all the performance of challenging authority, that tube is one of the few places where the presidency means nothing. You can’t fire the MRI. You can’t tweet your way out. You’re just a body, like everyone else.