How unhealthy is Donald Trump?
The former president turns 77 today.
Donald Trump turns 77 years old today.
If he wins in 2024 — at 78 — he would be the oldest person ever elected to serve as president. (Joe Biden was 77 when he won in 2020.)
In spite of is advanced age, we know less about Donald Trump’s overall health — and medical history — than any modern president. (Joe Biden’s age and health, it’s worth noting here, have become a major focus of the nascent 2024 campaign.)
Which is on purpose. Trump has, at every turn, sought to keep his health records shielded from the public — choosing instead to simply insist (and have others insist) that he is remarkably healthy and hale (and no more questions need to be asked).
But, the question DOES need to be asked: What exactly do we know of Trump’s health?
Start from the beginning.
Although he had once said that all candidates for president should release their medical records, Trump himself repeatedly promised (and then reneged) on doing so.
“As a presidential candidate, I have instructed my long-time doctor to issue, within two weeks, a full medical report-it will show perfection,” Trump tweeted in early December 2015.
What he did release was a letter from his personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, that made a series of outrageous claims.
“His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,” the letter read, in part. “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”1
Ever!
In September 2016, Trump said “I’ve given a letter from a doctor — he’s actually a great doctor, but that’s OK — but he gave a very strong letter” in defending Bornstein. In that same interview, he said he would “love to give full reports” and “love to give specifics.”
Later that month, he released a one-page letter — again from Bornstein — that provided more details on his health — including his cholesterol levels, blood sugar and weight. (Trump was technically overweight but not obese.)
While in the White House, Trump submitted to an annual physical — although the reports from the White House physician were spun to suggest, again, that Trump was in remarkable health.
In 2018, Dr. Ronny Jackson, who has gone on to serve in Congress and emerged as one of Trump’s leading defenders, said he had “incredible genes” and repeatedly described the president’s health as “excellent.”
In November 2019, Trump made an unannounced and unscheduled visit to Walter Reed hospital. The White House insisted it was just for routine tests. But, Mike Schmidt, the terrific New York Times reporter, reported in a book on the Trump White House that Vice President Mike Pence was “on standby” to take over the powers of the presidency is Trump had to “undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.”
In 2020, when Trump contracted Covid-19, White House physician Sean Conley offered misleading information about the then-president’s condition — a strategy he described as “reflect[ing] the upbeat attitude” of Trump.
We later learned Trump’s condition was far more serious than he — and Conley — let on at the time; there were fears he might have to be put on a ventilator due to his low blood oxygen levels.
What little do we then know about Trump’s health? Taking all the public reports together we know he is overweight bordering on obese, has a common form of heart disease and maintains bad-bordering-on-terrible eating and exercise habits.
A word on that since there’s been considerable reporting on how and what Trump eats as well we his aversion to exercise.
Trump is a devotee of McDonald’s — “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted” is his go-to order — and fast food more generally.
“One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald's,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016 of his affection for fast food. “One bad hamburger and you take Wendy's and all these other places and they're out of business. I like cleanliness, and I think you're better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food is coming from.”
On exercise, Trump adheres to what is best described as the battery theory: He believes that every person is born with a certain amount of life force. Exercise depletes that life force unnecessarily.
As the New York Times wrote in a 2015 profile of Trump:
Trump said he was not following any special diet or exercise regimen for the campaign. ‘All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements — they’re a disaster,’ he said. He exerts himself fully by standing in front of an audience for an hour, as he just did. ‘That’s exercise.’
In 2018, following Trump’s physical, Jackson told reporters that “Right now, on a day-to-day basis, [the president] doesn’t have a dedicated, defined exercise program.”
In response, Trump said famously/infamously “I get exercise. I mean I walk, I this, I that,” adding that: “I run over to a building next door. I get more exercise than people think.”
Aside from playing golf — which Trump does regularly — there is no available evidence that he works out regularly (or even occasionally).
Add it all up and you get, well, an incomplete picture. The honest truth is that we simply don’t know enough about Trump’s health to make an honest assessment of it.
Which is ironic. Because in 2016, Trump sought to make a campaign issue out of Hillary Clinton’s health. And he’s already signaling — in overt ways — that one of the main thrusts of his 2024 campaign will be focused on questions about Biden’s age and competence.
What’s remarkable is despite the decidedly limited amount of information we have on Trump’s health — and his advanced age — the public is far less concerned with it than they are with the same issues for Joe Biden.
In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last month almost 7 in 10 (68%) said they believed Biden was too old for another term; just 44% said the same of Trump.
What does that suggest to me? That Trump’s efforts to obfuscate and spin his health have, largely, worked. The public at large has far less concern about his ability and acuity than they do about Biden — despite the fact that we know FAR more about the current president’s health and medical past than we do about Trump’s.
His health then is yet another example of how Trump’s spin can win.
Years later — in 2018 — Bornstein told CNN that the contents of the letter had been entirely dictated by Trump. “I just made it up as I went along,” Bornstein said. He died in 2021.
Person, man woman camera tv says everything you need to know about his health.
I think the American people are going to be more concerned about Trump's dishonesty. his security risk to the Country and his penchant for fomenting crisis and chaos as well as his divisive actions and his multiple criminal charges pending against him than they would be concerned about his age and health. That is if he makes it through the Republican primary. He will not succeed in spinning his ways through all of the above. They say full me once , shame on on you and fool me twice , shame on m.e. Bob Marley famously said '"you can't fool all of the people all of the time". I tend to believe that his wise(Bob Marley that is) assertion is standing the test of time.