Judging by the latest news from the White House—about Donald Trump shuffling his legal team in apparent preparation for a lengthy battle with Robert Mueller, the special counsel—it may well be many months, or even longer, before we get a final resolution to the story of Russia’s interference in the election, and of the Trump campaign’s relationship to that interference. That’s frustrating, but, while we wait, we can perhaps take some consolation in the fact that one of the longstanding puzzles of the Trump era has been solved. We now have the backstory explaining how, in December, 2015, an Upper East Side doctor came to announce that Donald Trump’s medical test results were “astonishingly excellent,” and that, if he won the race, he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

The statement in question was issued by Dr. Harold Bornstein, a gastroenterologist attached to Lenox Hill Hospital and Trump’s longtime personal physician. (Bornstein became Trump’s doctor in 1980, when he inherited the real-estate developer as a patient from his father, Dr. Jacob Bornstein.) Bornstein’s statement was greeted with a lot of skepticism. This was partly due to its length: it took the form of a public letter of less than two hundred words. Another reason for skepticism was that the subject of the letter was an overweight, sixty-nine-year-old fast-food enthusiast with a known aversion to exercise. The fact that Bornstein looked, in photographs, like someone you’d expect to encounter at a Grateful Dead show rather than at a doctor’s office didn’t bolster the public’s confidence in his assessment, either. (Records confirmed that Bornstein earned his M.D. from Tufts University in 1975, and was certified by the American Board of Medicine three years later.)

The following August, a few months before the Presidential election, Bornstein granted an interview to NBC News. He confessed that he wrote the December statement in five minutes, while a driver waited impatiently outside his office to pick it up. “I thought about it all day, and at the end I get rushed, and I get anxious when I get rushed,” Bornstein recounted. “So I tried to get four or five lines down as fast as possible that they would be happy with.” With all the rush, Bornstein added, “I don’t think some of those words came out exactly how they were meant.”

Three weeks later, after the Trump campaign had repeatedly raised dubious questions about Hillary Clinton’s health, Bornstein released another public statement attesting to his patient’s vim and vigor. This one extended to five paragraphs, and it featured the results of some recent blood tests and other routine procedures. It concluded that Trump was “in excellent physical health.”

There matters rested until February 1, 2017, twelve days after Trump’s Inauguration, when the Times published a report by Lawrence K. Altman, a veteran medical correspondent, which began, “President Trump takes medication for three ailments, including a prostate-related drug to promote hair growth, Mr. Trump’s longtime physician, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, said in a series of recent interviews.”

At that time, we have now learned, Bornstein was hoping to be appointed as one of Trump’s personal physicians in the White House. The Times story put the kibosh on that idea. On Tuesday, in a new interview with NBC News, Bornstein recalled how, immediately after the Times article appeared, he got a call from Trump’s longtime personal assistant, Rhona Graff, who said, “So you wanted to be the White House doctor? Forget it, you’re out.’ ”

Two days later, Bornstein recalled, he was in his office when three men arrived, without warning, and demanded all of Trump’s medical records. One of them was Keith Schiller, Trump’s cropped-haired bodyguard; another was a burly associate of Schiller; the third was Alan Garten, the chief lawyer at the Trump Organization. The visitors stayed for about twenty-five or thirty minutes and created “a lot of chaos,” Bornstein recounted, and at no point did they present a medical-release form. Rather than asking for copies to be made of the Trump medical records, they insisted on taking the originals. Bornstein described the incident as “a raid,” and he said, “I feel raped, that’s how I feel. Raped, frightened and sad.” He added, “I couldn’t believe anybody was making a big deal out of a drug to grow his hair that seemed to be so important.”

Bornstein also addressed the origins of the December, 2015, statement. Bornstein now says that it was Trump himself who was primarily responsible for its contents. “He wrote it himself,” Bornstein said bluntly. Bornstein claims that, though the language in the statement was his, his role was “more like the slave who carried out the orders that came from Fifth Avenue.”

Later on Tuesday, CNN caught up with Bornstein outside his office, and he provided further details about the creation of the letter. He recalled that he and his wife were driving across Central Park when Trump called him. Trump then “dictated the letter, and I would tell him what he couldn’t put in there,” Bornstein said. “They came to pick up their letter at four o’clock or something.” As in his previous accounts, Bornstein said he was rushed when the car arrived, so he wrote up the report quickly. “That’s black humor, that letter,” he said. “That’s my sense of humor. It’s like the movie ‘Fargo’: it takes the truth and moves it in a different direction.”

That last sentence could be applied to the entire Trump political persona, which was built, as these latest revelations confirm, on a gilded scrap heap of embellishments, deceptions, embroideries, and outright lies. It remains to be seen whether, like many Coen Brothers movies, the Trump reality flick will also come to a spectacularly messy conclusion.