The statement released by Navy Commander Sean Conley reads:
Despite some of the speculation, the President has not had any chest pain, nor was he evaluated or treated for any urgent or acute issues. Specifically, he did not undergo any specialized cardiac or neurological evaluations.
Still, the unannounced visit to Walter Reed begs a more plausible explanation.
I thought of this theory at midnight and couldn’t sleep until I memorializing it in writing.
It is entirely consistent with Trump’s tendency to believe in conspiracy theories and have periods of paranoid ideation. For example:
Add this tendency to think and make decisions based on paranoia ideation the fact that he knows that there are people close to him to have been or are never-Trumper. You can see why he might believe someone may have wanted to poison him.
In the reporting on this we have learned that the White House has a medical team and a facility which can provide life saving treatment in the case of a heart attack or stroke as well as minor ailments like acid indigestion. They can evaluate sudden onset symptoms and treat them without needing a hospital.
Why would Trump end up going to Walter Reed on a weekend unannounced in advance knowing that it would raise questions about his health.
The answer could be that he, not the doctors, ordered it.
Why would he do this?
It is entirely possible that this is because something triggered his panicking because he thought he’d ingested a poison or had been exposed to a lethal poison in another way.
Perhaps some food he ate simply tasted off to him. It could have had a metallic taste for example. This is a symptom of a number of disorders from sinusitis to dementia, but also could have been in his imagination. Regardless of the cause it could have been a trigger to a paranoia induced panic especially if it never happened before.
Whether associated with eating or not, he could have gotten light headed or dizzy, fainted, or become unsteady on his feet for unknown physically reasons or because of the stress that we know he is under.
All of these symptoms would have been evaluated at the White House and determined not to be anything to worry about and certainly not life threatening.
Still, they could have triggered a delusional paranoid reaction in a president who has become convinced that there are people around him who not only wish him ill, but are going to try to make him ill so he can no longer serve.
At the most extreme level of paranoia he may have convinced himself that there is a secret cabal within the White House plotting to assassinate him.
Add to all of this, it has been said that Trump eats McDonalds because he has a fear of being poisoned.
He has a long-term fear of being poisoned. We’ll come back to that; suffice it to say that the way it is described suggests that this predates his ascension to high office. So it can only have worsened: if you’re worried about a toxic attack when you’re fronting The Apprentice, imagine how much more likely that must seem once you’re president. It’s such a peculiar fear, dated to the point of myth – the kind of threat someone might dream if they had half-listened through one Roman fable and then refracted everything they ever knew through their own ego. But let’s not start intuiting: the picture’s bad enough just with its raw facts.
Trump’s answer to the poisoning threat is to eat McDonald’s, by preference, all the time; the burger chain never knows he’s coming, and it’s all pre-made. This has the distinct ring of post-hoc justification – it would be much more reliable to get a nine-year-old to sit next to him and pre-taste his food. Besides which, even if the staff of McDonald’s don’t in general know who’s coming, it would be unusual for them to feed the president without a heads-up. Much more likely, Trump fears poison and he really likes McDonald’s. The Guardian.
Even if assured by the doctors who might or might not have done a blood panel that he had nothing to worry about and was fine, if his paranoia had taken control they would have no authority to deny his demand he be taken to Walter Reed.
If Trump had convinced himself he’d been dosed with a potentially lethal poison it would make sense that he'd want to be at a hospital where his life could be saved by state of the art equipment.
Trump if certainly well aware of the myriad ways lethal chemicals like ricin can be used kill you. He may vaguely remember that Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident was assassinated using a poison-tipped umbrella. He may recall that ricin was sent through the mail and that there have been ricin false alarms. He may know that in 2018, Sergei Skripal the former Russian military officer and double agent for the UK's intelligence services and his daughter were poisoned in England, although he probably couldn’t name the agent, Novickok, which was used. And then there was the highly publicized assassination by Russian agents of Alexander Litvinenko by polonium-210.
People prone to paranoia think about these things when feel people are out to do them harm.
If he was literary or historically minded he may be thinking he could come to an end like Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator for life, betrayed and killed by his protege Marcus Brutus and some 60 or his senators. Et tu Brute indeed.