Comedian Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday targeted President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump again, suggesting that the president’s hands are bruised “from Melania swatting them away.”
While there is plenty of fodder for comedy in the political world these days, can we please stop with the jokes about the president’s hands? I ask on behalf of the Silent Generation, and every baby boomer who spent much of the 1970s and ‘80s chasing the perfect tan.
We’re paying the price for all that sunshine now, and for a lot of us, the bill’s coming due in easily bruised hands.
The president’s hands have been the subject of a bewildering amount of news coverage for the past year, with people speculating that there is some sort of cover-up going on about his health. He has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, but that’s not what’s going on with his hands.
Most likely, Trump often has bruises for the same reason I do: He spent too much time in the sun over decades, and now has aging, thinning skin that erupts in anger every time it’s bumped even slightly.
There are clinical names for this condition: actinic purpura, solar purpura and, most insultingly, senile purpura. But it pretty much boils down to this: old hands.
And like aging generally, there’s not much that can be done about it, even when you’re the president of the free world.
First described by British physician Thomas Bateman in 1818, the condition is estimated to affect about 12% of people 50 and older, and 30% of those 75 and older. It is, as the authors of one study wrote, a “benign yet visually striking” condition; another paper said that it can be associated with “significant psychological stress” for older people. This is, in part, because it’s so easy to bring a bruise on and so hard to make it go away; the discoloration can last for two to three weeks.
At the start of the pandemic, when we were all told to keep our hands away from our face, I remember someone writing on social media that she had never before realized how many times she touches her face over the course of a day.
Likewise, you will never know, until you are past the age to claim Social Security, how many times a day you lightly nick a finger or bump a hand just doing ordinary things around the house.
And if you do unordinary things, well, best keep a supply of Arnica cream on hand. The efficacy of oils and creams derived from the Arnica Montana plant has been studied, with mixed results. They haven’t done much for me.
When reporters ask about his bruises, Trump invariably says they’re caused by taking aspirin or marathon rounds of hand-shaking. All of that is plausible. Once, I came home from a run with a large bruise on my right hand that wasn’t there when I started; it bloomed because I’d picked up a piece of firewood by the side of the road and carried it the last mile. It was a slight trauma, but trauma enough.
As one study says, once your skin is in this condition, it is “very sensitive to the slightest trauma or shearing force.”
Once your skin is in this condition, it takes every opportunity to publicly complain.
“Trump says he bruised his hand on a table,” The New York Times proclaimed in a January headline that seemed skeptical. And yet thousands, maybe millions, of other older people will do the same this week, and they’re not having their bruised hands splayed across the internet, and articles written about why they can’t find a better shade of makeup to cover them. Trump is criticized if he doesn’t try to hide the bruises; he’s criticized if he does. “My hand is like a wounded warrior,” he once said on “Fox & Friends.”
He’s the president, he can take it, you might say. And it’s true that Trump is mocked and criticized for far worse things, often deservedly so.
But there are two reasons the pundits and reporters should stand down on this particular subject, the first being the people over 70 that we love. About 1 in 25 Americans is 80 or older, and the U.S. population is getting grayer by the day.
The second is this: Old age is like an object in the rearview mirror — both are a lot closer than they seem.