James Carville claims Donald Trump has Syphilis--We've been down this road before

Former Bill Clinton campaign manager, 79-year-old James Carville, during a talk on Politicon, pulled an old rabbit out of his hat--he accused Trump of having/covering up his syphilis.

Carville said concerning some missing medical records, “Those records will contain the fact that he had syphilis."

On January 17, Trump faced similar speculation from Carville after a photo showed his hands covered in red marks.

Carville cited a number of medical doctors who he said had confirmed to him the marks were a sign of "secondary syphilis."

Sound familiar?

It was speculated about by a physician in 2017 in an article published in the New Republic. The smear piece by an infectious disease physician named Dr. Steven Beutler suggested that then President Donald Trump’s so-called "bizarre" behavior may be due to neurosyphilis.

Beutler admitted his diagnosis is not conclusive (duh?).

Does Trump suffer from this condition? I cannot, of course, establish this diagnosis from a distance. There’s a great deal of information I don’t have access to, which could be critical in reaching the correct conclusion. In Trump’s case, there are many diagnostic possibilities, and we have very little background information because the slim medical summary he released was vague, unverifiable, and possibly outdated.

He later in the article discusses Trump’s past sexual history that also leads him to his unsubstantiated theory.

Really? Is this what a medical professional should be writing about in any publication? One has to ask, what are Dr. Beutler’s motives?

I suspect the same as James Carville's.

As is Dr Agnes Wold. The prominent physician and bacteriologist from Sweden tweeted something to the same effect in 2018. Wold tweeted in response to a Trump tweet referencing himself as a “stable genius”- “Wow! Can we make a guess at late-stage syphilis?” (Translated). Dr Wold later noted she was just joking.

Dr. Art Caplan from the NYU Langone Medical Center’s Division of Medical Ethics said in 2016:

No one should be diagnosing anyone that they haven’t examined. It isn’t right to do it for presidential candidates, and it’s not right to do it for anybody else. You’re basically speculating about information that you don’t have—information that is incomplete. You don’t know the patient’s history. You haven’t tested them. You haven’t talked to them. You don’t have any relationship with them over time. You’re just looking at instances of how they behave or what you see on news clips and other places.

It is just wrong to ever diagnose someone from a distance. Part of the problem with doing that is that you are trying to pretend that you can impute information or make assessments that really aren’t there. We don’t want to turn medicine into some version of psychic phenomena where you can tell how ill or healthy somebody is without actually seeing them.

Cheap and unsubstantiated by Carville, Beutler and Wold all around.