Donald Trump had his annual medical examination on Friday, a check-up that may give the public its first details in years about the health of a man who, in January, became the oldest in US history to be sworn in as president.
“I have never felt better, but nevertheless, these things must be done!” the 78-year-old posted on his social media site ahead of the examination, which was conducted at Walter Reed national military medical center in Bethesda, Maryland.
How long the exam took wasn’t immediately clear. All told, however, he spent more than five hours at the center before heading to Air Force One and flying to Florida for the weekend.
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 promised a “readout from the White House physician” that would be released “as soon as we possibly can” and suggested it would be comprehensive.
“I can confirm the president is in very good shape,” Leavitt said. She noted that the physical didn’t require Trump being placed under anaesthesia.
A White House doctor in 2018, when Trump was serving his first term, said the president was in overall excellent health but needed to shed weight and start a daily exercise routine.
The finished medical 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 representative Ronny Jackson – a staunch Trump supporter – wrote a memo describing a gunshot wound to Trump’s right ear.
In a subsequent interview with CBS in August last year, 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, lacks 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 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”.
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.
With Associated Press and Reuters
