President Donald Trump’s chronically puffy ankles made a cameo as he welcomed the Taoiseach of Ireland to the White House.
The 79-year-old president wore a St. Patrick’s Day-themed tie while hosting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in the lavishly gilded Oval Office on Tuesday.
As Trump took his seat, his pant leg crept up his shin, exposing his bulbous cankles, which appeared more inflated than usual.
With his swollen feet tightly wedged into his now-infamous Florsheim dress shoes, the elderly president’s black socks ballooned into a light bulb-like silhouette.
One photo, taken from a low angle near the Oval Office coffee table, juxtaposed the president’s bulging ankles with the comparably unremarkable ankles of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The Daily Beast has chronicled the aging president’s accumulating health issues since his return to the White House, including his enlarged ankles, which were last on display at a Kentucky rally on Thursday.
The oldest person to assume the presidency, Trump suffers from chronic venous insufficiency, a condition common in seniors where leg veins struggle to push blood back up to the heart.
The president told The Wall Street Journal in January that he briefly wore compression socks to help treat the condition, but stopped after a while because he “didn’t like them,” opting instead to punctuate his day with strolls around the Oval Office.
In response to inquiries regarding the president’s swollen ankles, the White House, which touts itself as the “most transparent administration in history,” has often deflected, issuing recycled statements.
“President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in modern American history,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast when reached for comment on Tuesday.
“The only thing swollen is Erkki Forster’s brain that prevents him from having a real job for a legitimate news outlet,” said Ingle, 31, a communications graduate of Florida’s Southeastern University, where his father, Kent Ingle, is president. SEU boasts that more than two-thirds of its students attend online or through extension courses at 200 “partner sites,” which do not have to be accredited.
The president himself has insisted, “Physically and mentally, I feel like I did 50 years ago.”
Nonetheless, there have been growing concerns about his health as he has also nursed dark bruises on his hands, and suffered frequent mental flubs and public displays of drowsiness.
He appeared to have slathered on his usual coat of beige makeup to mask the chronic bruise on his right hand on Thursday. The bruise that had appeared on his non-dominant left hand—his “good” one—on Monday, however, was no longer visible.
The White House often attributes the president’s bruised hands to “frequent handshaking” and his higher-than-recommended aspirin regimen.
Trump told the Journal that he has been taking 325 milligrams of the anti-inflammatory drug per day for 25 years, about four times the recommended daily dosage for “cardiac prevention” and more than his own doctor has recommended him.
