Although she has gone to extraordinary lengths to distract and deceive American voters, the truth is finally coming out: Hillary Clinton has an 11th toe.

I don’t have the medical records. She refuses to release them. But just try to come up with some other explanation for why she’s so infrequently photographed in sandals or flip-flops; why she seldom appears barefoot in public; why, during debates, she keeps her legs, especially the lower halves, tucked carefully behind the lectern.

She’s covering something up, and it’s that freakish, disqualifying digit.

Have you watched her walk? Look closely. She wobbles a bit, or maybe it’s more of a teeter, combined with a lurch, and the likeliest cause is podiatric asymmetry. I consulted foot specialists. At least they referred to themselves that way online, and when I assured them that an interview with me could be their springboard to Sean Hannity, they opened up.

“Does Hillary Clinton have a superfluous toe?” I asked one of them.

“I can’t definitively rule that out,” he said.

“Hillary Clinton: Hobbled and hiding it?” I asked the other, who agreed that “until she permits a thorough examination of her feet — and I mean both of them — how can we be sure?”

I’m not holding my breath. Clinton doesn’t volunteer information; she waits for the subpoena. A letter from her longtime physician that she provided last year was all of two pages long, and that’s not nearly enough medical detail about a 68-year-old raring to take on one of the most grueling jobs on the planet, let alone a 68-year-old facing a swirl of questions — a swirl, mind you! — about her gait.

Admittedly, Donald Trump, 70, gave us considerably less, even though he’d be the oldest first-term president ever. In a paltry cluster of sentences, his supposed doctor pronounced his health “astonishingly excellent,” a diagnostic term heretofore absent from the medical literature, and that same sycophant — I mean doctor — demonstrated impressive retroactive omniscience, saying that he could “state unequivocally” that no American president had been in shape as splendiferous as Trump’s.

This testimonial was less science than sonnet: gushing, besotted.

I’m pretty sure it was written in iambic pentameter. Phrases were plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s 2008 physical.

But you merely need to watch Trump lope from his comfy chauffeured car to his plush private jet to know that everything below his waist is working magnificently, including his toes, of which there are an even number. They’re amazing toes. You won’t believe these toes. Vladimir Putin once offered several Russian oil fields in exchange for them. Paul Manafort drew up the contract, including his 40 percent commission for the swap.

But back to Clinton. In her physician’s report, did you see anything about her feet? No. Rudy Giuliani pointed this out. He was on Fox News, raving about what an obvious invalid she is and leaving out the part about his decision not to run against her for a Senate seat in 2000 because he was battling prostate cancer while she was sturdy as an ox. An ox with an extra toe, that is, although her critics didn’t catch it at the time.

Maybe they weren’t Googling aggressively enough. We’re only now realizing the full potential of the internet, which connects visionary dissidents once dismissed as isolated crackpots and gives them a big, ready billboard for their hallucinations — oops, revelations. They can tweet the unvarnished, unshod truth, and who needs cumbersome Freedom of Information Act requests or tedious investigative journalism when you have hashtags? #ShowTheToe.

The lamestream media pussyfoots around all of this, protecting Clinton by persecuting Trump for his unshared tax returns. It’s a classic diversionary tactic. But while a man’s bank account is personal, a woman’s body is public. It’s in the Constitution, maybe one of the amendments, or should be.

Besides, there are ramifications to whatever’s going on inside Clinton’s clogs. An extra toe means an extra toenail, and can a country in straits as dire as ours suffer a commander in chief whose pedicure takes minutes longer than the average American’s?

If it’s on her left foot, which is what some carefully edited video suggests, it means she’s pulled constantly to the left. We can’t have that.

Not everyone in the Clinton Conspiracy Industry agrees that this is a matter to be pressed as forcefully as others. They say it jumbles together issues of vastly discrepant seriousness: her emails, the Clinton Foundation, Benghazi, Birkenstocks. They say it turns each assertion of scandal into more white noise.

But that’s flawed thinking — and a defeatist attitude to boot. When you’re hunting game as slippery as Clinton, you use every weapon you have, never knowing which will trip her up and take her down. Mark my words. This toe could be her Achilles’ heel.

Thomas L. Friedman is off today

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331662&forum_id=2#31261184)