(Headline USA) Democratic strategist James Carville, the former campaign adviser for President Bill Clinton, suggested this week that former President Donald Trump had syphilis after a photo of Trump showed red sores on his right hand.
Trump was photographed waving as he left his New York City apartment en route to the trial filed by left-wing socialite E. Jean Carroll, who previously had accused him of rape.
The photo by the Associated Press showed several red marks on Trump’s hand, causing a frenzy on leftist social-media accounts and gossip sites—including the formerly conservative Drudge Report, which took a hard-left turn during the Trump presidency.
“If you go to the Drudge Report I think it’ll still be up,” Carville said on the Politicon podcast.
“Yeah. There’s a story that talks about Trump having hand-cuts, and you can link to it,” he continued. “They don’t look like cuts to me. They look like sores.”
Carville claimed he asked “a number of [doctors] what medical condition manifests itself through handsores.”
The answer was “immediate and unanimous,” he claimed. “Secondary syphilis … I think there’s a good chance this man has the clap, and I’m not being particularly secretive about it.”
Carville went on to note that the image could have been “doctored” or tampered with.
“Maybe the story goes somewhere. Maybe it won’t. But I’m telling you, at 1 o’clock Eastern, I’m humping this thing like a young dog on old furniture,” he said.
Shortly after Carville’s comments, #SyphilisDon began trending on social media.
Even MSNBC’s Morning Joe speculated about the cause of the red marks on Trump’s hands, claiming the marks could have been wounds from pounding on the table during the defamation trial.
However, Dr. Joshua Zeichner, an associate professor of dermatology at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, told Business Insider that Trump most likely just had a rash, which could be caused by almost anything.
“Rashes on the hands can be caused by a variety of factors, ranging from infections to inflammatory conditions to external exposures,” Zeichner said.
Carville’s former bosses, the Clintons, have been connected to stories about sexually-transmitted diseases periodically throughouth the years, including at least one photo that showed Bill Clinton with a herpes-like cold-sore on his upper lip while posing with U2 frontman Bono.
Speculation was rampant that the former president and Jeffrey Epstein pal was either admitted for an STD or was likely to test positive for one after he checked into the University of California, Irvine Medical Center with what was reported to be a “non-Covid-related infection” in 2021.
Sources later claimed it was a “urinary tract infection” that “spread to his bloodstream,” according to Gawker.
A close friend and donor of Clinton’s, former Calvin Klein CEO Arnold Simon, was sued in 2013 for giving herpes to a date he’d met on Match.com.
Hillary Clinton’s public relationship with STDs is far more innocuous, although she made headlines during her 2016 presidential campaign for supporting an effort to destigmatize them.
Thank you, @HillaryClinton, for reading. I'm incredibly moved. To be accurate, I'm ugly crying. #ImWithHer pic.twitter.com/kt5tAVWrFX
— ella dawson (@brosandprose) September 6, 2016
Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that one in six Americans between ages 14 and 49 had herpes, Clinton’s efforts to pander to them were not enough to secure the election for her that year over Trump, her Republican rival.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
