Despite long questioning predecessor Joe Biden’s physical and mental capacity, Trump has routinely kept basic facts about his own health shrouded in secrecy – shying away from traditional presidential transparency on medical issues.
If history is any indication, his latest physical is likely to produce a flattering report that’s scarce on details.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at the White House, while Trump was being examined, that the president was undergoing his “routine and long-scheduled physical.” She promised a “readout from the White House physician” that would be released “as soon as we possibly can” and suggested the details would be comprehensive.
“I can confirm the president is in very good shape,” Leavitt said.
Such a report would be the first public information on Trump’s health since an assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Rather than release medical records at that time, Texas Rep Ronny Jackson – a staunch supporter who served as his White House physician and once joked in the White House briefing room that Trump could live to be 200 if he had a healthier diet – wrote a memo describing a gunshot wound to Trump’s right ear. In a subsequent interview with CBS last August, Trump said he’d “very gladly” release his medical records but never did.
Trump is three years younger than Biden. But on Inauguration Day of his second term in January, Trump was five months older than Biden was during his 2021 inauguration – making Trump the nation’s oldest president to be sworn into office.
Presidents have privacy rights protecting their medical records just like ordinary citizens, and that means they have leeway over what details are released.
Modern annual physicals, though, have often played key roles in offering the public a sense of the commander-in-chief’s health – despite historic instances of concealing major medical issues, including President Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating stroke in 1919.
Trump has long opted for offering few substantive details about his health. Before Jackson’s memo, Americans hadn’t seen key details since November 2023, when Dr Bruce A Aronwald released a letter to coincide with Biden’s 81st birthday, saying Trump was in “excellent” physical and mental health.
The letter, posted on Trump’s social media platform, lack the basics – such as the Republican’s weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, or the results of any test. Instead, Aronwlad wrote that he’d examined Trump that fall and found his “physical exams were well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional,” while also noting that Trump had “reduced his weight.”
Trump was treated at Walter Reed for his serious bout with the coronavirus in 2020. During that, Trump’s physician offered a rosy prognosis on his condition, though White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said some of Trump’s vital signs were “very concerning.”
After Trump recovered, more details emerged that he had been sicker than he’d let on.
But Trump largely refused to say more about his health at the time, instead submitting to a pretaped, remote medical “evaluation” and interview on Fox News Channel. That was conducted by Dr Marc Siegel, a Fox News contributor who had questioned Hillary Clinton’s physical ability to serve as president in 2016 and later urged the Biden White House to test the then-president’s cognitive acuity.
In November 2019, meanwhile, Trump’s trip to Walter Reed for a physical was omitted from his public schedule, breaking the White House protocol of giving advance public notice of them.
The visit was revealed three days later, with Trump disclosing that he’d had a “very routine physical.” The White House released a subsequent statement from the president’s then-personal physician, US Navy Cmdr Sean Conley, saying it had been a “planned interim checkup” kept “off the record” due to scheduling uncertainties.
Arguably, Trump’s most famous past comments about his own health came during a television interview in July 2020, when he listed off “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV” while attempting to demonstrate his cognitive abilities.
Trump said that a collection of those five nouns, or ones like them, stated in order, demonstrated mental fitness and were part of a cognitive test he had aced.
