Hutzell: Does President Trump have cyclosporiasis? ’Cause he was spewing some weird BS.

Shall we start with explosive diarrhea?

The summer of 2026 is so bad, in so many different ways — political, environmental, economical — that a count of all that’s gone wrong might as well start with the proctological.

Microscopic cyclospora parasites surged across the nation in recent weeks, with symptoms including panicked runs to the bathroom.

Looks like Taylor Farms lettuce served at Taco Bell was a culprit, although the restaurant chain pulled pico de gallo in five states where American guts have been in the most severe twist.

The Food and Drug Administration wasn’t prepared to clean up this messy mystery.

Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Donald Trump pulled tracking of the parasite from FoodNet, the surveillance network it runs with the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and health departments from Maryland and nine other states.

Except nobody told the public until an infectious disease policy think tank pointed it out July 1.

So it was with some trepidation that I considered Trump’s tirade to the nation Thursday night. Would he, I wondered, address the depth of poo that seems to be rising above our collective ankles?

Nope. It was another form of scatology altogether, adding China to his list of make-believe conspirators who he claims, without evidence, stole victory from him in the 2020 presidential election.

“Great damage has been done to our country,” the aggrieved president said. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

If you weren’t convinced that the president’s midsummer night’s fantasy is setting up an attempted heist of enormous proportions at the ballot box this fall, I’d like to sell you some questionable shredded iceberg.

This is another summer of politics that makes you sick to your stomach. It may be the first with cucumbers as a risky proposition.

Industrial vegetable patches aren’t just running loose with pathogens that our safety systems seem unable to catch. We’re paying more for the privilege of eating from them and casting the gastroenterological dice.

Produce is part of a grocery bill that is now 30% higher than it was just six summers ago. First, it was driven by the pandemic; then by economic stimulus packages under Trump and former President Joe Biden. Now it’s Trump’s quagmire in Iran that’s pushing up costs.

Energy prices are high and likely to stay that way — they rise like a rocket and fall like a feather, as people who like to say those sorts of things say.

The price of everything that arrives at your grocery on planes, trains or automobiles has been recalculated to recoup higher transportation costs.

Nothing arrives by bumboat anymore, so that’s everything.

You can’t escape with a trip to your local farmers market, where the constipated Strait of Hormuz has resulted in dazzling fertilizer expenses for farmers.

If you’d like to take a deep breath at this point, think twice.

Temperatures in the low 100s have combined with wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada and other places to create a respiratory threat.

I wasn’t sure if it was the dystopian stench of burning Ontario I inhaled in Baltimore the other day, or the nauseating aroma of another pistachio tide. Maryland was under a Code Red air quality alert.

Except for three Western Maryland counties, where the keepers of the warning system on Friday rolled out a color new to me — purple.

“If you must be outside,” read the warning, “keep it brief, take it easy, and consider a well-fitting N95 or KN95 mask, which reduces smoke particle exposure (cloth and surgical masks do not).”

If you plan on staying inside, plan to pay more.

BGE wants an additional $8 a month, on average, and power grid operator PJM Interconnection can’t line up enough generation sources to keep us and data centers cool at the same time.

Did I mention that measles is back?

We’re up to nine cases in Maryland so far this year, with five new infections reported last week as the nation is on the verge of another record-shattering year.

The person responsible for this? You guessed it: Trump.

He wanted the luster of the Kennedy name, so he brought on Make America Healthy Again quack Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.

Kennedy has been pumping up dark fantasies about the risks from public health vaccinations, including communicable childhood diseases such as measles.

So a trip to Texas — home of all-hat-no-cattle politics — is another spin of the infection wheel.

None of this, of course, came up in the president’s televised screed about elections. He’s been talking dookie on this for more than a decade.

“America is back and doing really well, but we still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed, because no country could be great without fair and honest elections,” Trump said from his recently gilded White House.

In a normal election, Republicans would likely pay a price for Trump’s frankly crazy conduct. But if anyone can fumble the historic opportunity here in the face of unprecedented table-tilting, it’s the Democratic Party.

Little old Maryland is right in the sweet spot for efforts to suppress votes that don’t go the president’s way.

It’s got a Democratic majority, a large Black population, is generally kind to immigrants and successfully encourages mail-in voting.

Maryland has fended off a grab for voter rolls so far, but the Trump administration is still fighting against democracy in court.

The summer of 2026 will fade into fall, and then we’ll be knee-deep in all the bull nuggets of an election season.

So, wash your produce and keep the toilet paper handy.

Just expect to pay more for it. Trump’s tariffs on Canadian wood pulp are keeping those prices high, too.