Donald Trump’s allegedly ailing health has been the subject of media speculation for months, which analysts have said is interrupting the president’s quest to be seen as an unflinching strongman.

Salon writer Chauncey DeVega suggested in a recent column that Trump’s invasion of Venezuela was a “prime opportunity” for the president to “get his swagger back.”

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But the problem, he said, is that Trump can’t hide his clear mental and physical decline.

DeVega recounted Trump’s press briefing at Mar-A-Lago in the aftermath of the invasion. “Reading the president’s remarks is a very different experience from watching his performance,” he wrote.

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“Trump sounded tired and unwell. As [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan] Caine spoke, the president’s eyes appeared closed, as if he were fighting off sleep while standing up.”

“Symbolically, if Trump the strongman ruler is made to look mortal and fully human, then the inevitable victory and permanence of the movement itself — which has its own collective, physical and emotional energy and life — is called into doubt.”

Fellow Salon writer Amanda Marcotte expressed a similar sentiment in a November 19th op-ed, in which she speculated that the president’s deteriorating health spurred Republicans to vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files.

“When the authoritarian leader starts to display physical impairment, the people who have been chafing under his iron fist stop fearing him,” Marcotte wrote. “They start to rebel.”

DeVega also explains that the Venezuela “takeover,” as Trump has called it, will no doubt be a mess. “As the U.S. was reminded by the decades-long disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, nation-building and regime change are among the most difficult tasks a foreign power can engage in, usually requiring an open-ended commitment of financial, administrative, and military resources.”

“Swagger often dissolves when it encounters reality,” he concluded. “The question then becomes, will Trump pivot, or will he instead let himself continue to be possessed and flattered by his own version of MAGA machismo on the international stage?”

DeVega is not the only one to posit that the need to feel manly and powerful was a primary motivation for Trump’s Venezuela “misadventure,” as DeVega called it.

Out MS Now anchor Rachel Maddow recently eviscerated the Trump administration’s flailing logic for the invasion and suggested he merely did it because he can.

“What this is is a president who can barely bother with coming up with some barely false pretext because what he really wants is totally, unilateral, totally unaccountable, unquestioned ability to use the U.S. military anywhere for any purpose against anyone, even if it is inexplicable or unpopular or even illegal,” Maddow said.

“He wants to break the perceived connection between public legitimacy for military action and the use of the United States military. He wants the ability to use the U.S. military with the consent of no one.”

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