It’s time to have a serious conversation about Trump’s health

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If you haven’t been paying attention, Washington and social media have spent Labor Day weekend in a frenzy over Donald Trump’s health. The president, who seems like he can’t stomach staying out of the public eye and spotlight for even a few hours, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday — nor any over the long weekend. That’s an unusually long period of time out of public view. Searches for “Is Trump dead?” soared on Google Saturday and became one of the most-searched terms of the holiday weekend, and #whereistrump trended on other social media sites.

After he was glimpsed from a distance by the White House press pool leaving to golf on Saturday, social media Carrie Mathisons picked apart his golf photos wondering whether the White House was circulating old photos of the president on the links. Uncharacteristically, during the golf outing, he never even wandered up to the press pool to rant or rave about recent world headlines. Illinois governor JB Pritzker trolled Trump by demanding a proof-of-life photo. On Sunday, group chats around the capital lit up with a 31-tweet-long thread by a crypto investor named Adam Cochran alleging that Trump was in ill health. This morning, the press corps was kept about 100 yards from the president.

The speculation wasn’t helped by a series of strange answers J.D. Vance gave in a USA Today interview last week, where he said he was ready to be president if needed: “I've gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the last 200 days.” Maybe that’s just Vance being awkward and strange — it’s hard to think of any subject where Vance giving an interview has helped — but Trump himself (or someone on his social media accounts) also engaged with the speculation by posting a “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE” post on Truth Social, which might rank second only this weekend to Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre car accident for raising more questions than it answered.

“Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes and memes have abounded, but this morning, there’s not a single story on the homepage of the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or CNN about Trump’s health — but there is a story on the New York Post about how robust the president’s health surely is! (One of the few very good treatments of the subject in recent days has come from Public Notice.)

One of my running themes of media criticism in the Trump era has been that the national media knows all-too-well how to provide wall-to-wall coverage and elevate something from a “news story” to a “news event.” (Think Hunter Biden or Hillary’s emails!) It’s very clear — at least so far — that Trump’s health is not a news “event,” but what’s even more puzzling is the extent to which the national media doesn’t even treat it as a news “story.” As Public Notice wrote, “It’s shocking that since July, no major news outlets have done serious investigations about Trump’s health and what the White House is trying to cover up about it.”

It’s long past time we had a serious conversation about Trump’s increasingly puzzling health questions and apparent mental decline.  

First, a disclaimer: This is not a conspiracist post. I don’t allege any inside knowledge or special theory — I’m not a medical professional and don’t have some pet diagnosis divined from some guesswork off long-range photography or some such. (Along those lines, I’m actually not going to address Adam Cochran’s claims at all here — maybe he’s right, maybe he’s not — I just have no idea.) For all I know, Trump is literally telling the truth that he’s never been healthier or hardier — his dad, after all, made it to age 93! Instead, this is an attempt to lay out visible obvious evidence that should provoke more questions and digging from the White House press corps than it has. 

Second, my primary intellectual interest stems primarily as a historian of presidential continuity. In 2017, I wrote RAVEN ROCK, which is probably the definitive general interest book on presidential continuity and the government’s Doomsday plans. Memes and jokes aside, a diminished or incapacitated commander-in-chief is one of the gravest crises a modern nuclear power can face. The 25th Amendment that governs presidential succession and powers grew out of the fears of the nuclear age — there needs to be no doubt at any moment in the nuclear age about who is in charge of the country’s missiles, bombers, and submarines — and that makes the arc of the president’s likely health particularly important in modern times. (Aside: I had the pleasure this summer of reading Rebecca Lubot’s forthcoming book about this topic if you’re keen to dive deeper and have already read RAVEN ROCK!) 

Again, maybe the president’s health is totally fine — but given the questions and the importance of understanding the state of president’s mental and physical well-being, it’s all the more critical that the press dig into this. 

To me, there are six clear reasons we should be talking about this more than we are and why the press corps should be digging more deeply and more seriously around this topic:

1) The bruised hands. The puzzle of Trump’s badly bruised and heavily make-up-ed hands has been one of the summer’s odder presidential story lines. The White House has maintained that the bruises come from how much Trump loves shaking hands. “President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history. His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day,” Karoline Leavitt said.

White House physician Sean Barbabella breezily dismissed the bruising in a memo, saying it was “benign” and “consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking,” but there’s reason to believe there’s more to it than that. For one thing, the bruising isn’t limited to his dominant handshaking hand; it also has been a regularly recurring phenomenon of the last year. Barbabella’s dismissal also raises some curious questions, saying it’s a common side-effect of “aspirin therapy,” but it’s not clear from at least our public understanding of the president’s health (more on that below) that he should be on “aspirin therapy.” 

2) The pattern changes. Donald Trump is basically the most habit-bound and routine-bound man we know in American politics. And yet we’ve seen some major departures of his routine in recent weeks — including, not least of all, that he stuck in Washington all this weekend. Trump takes off for one of his golf resorts the first chance he can nearly every weekend of the year, and yet he’s just choosing to spend an extra-long holiday weekend hanging out at the White House? Why? Is his medical team wanting to keep him closer to top secure medical facilities? 

At the August 22^nd Oval Office event where photos of Trump’s bruised hands went viral, I was struck by something else — as Public Notice was too: The oddity of Trump appearing tie-less. In fact, all the men in the photo op are not wearing their ties, making clear that this was a coordinated decision to align with the president’s sartorial choice. Trump effectively never appears in the Oval Office without a tie — remember how they berated Zelenskyy for appearing in the Oval Office without a suit earlier this year? Scroll back through the summer and there appears to be no recent precedent for the president NOT wearing a tie in the Oval Office. It also is a rare — if not unprecedented — time that he wears a hat while sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. So for this one event, one where the president’s ill health appears on very public display, he and everyone else in the event, including JD Vance, chooses to go tie-less and he also wears a hat? At the very least, it would cause me to ask around about what else was going with Donald Trump on August 22nd?

3) The years of lies. Normally, the health of the president is very much the nation’s business. This is a person who at any hour of any day might be called upon to make enormous decisions — including, of course, the ultimate unilateral decision about whether to launch military action or even go to nuclear war. And yet from the start of his presidential campaign, bald-faced lies and exaggerations of Donald Trump’s personal vitality have been the norm. According to his personal doctor, he even personally dictated the 2015 campaign letter from his physician that declared, “Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” 

We know less real information about Donald Trump’s health than any president in modern times — arguably since JFK’s doctors covered up the extent of his pain in the presidency. Much of what passes for health information from Trump is laughably exaggerated, so bare bones as to be equally dubious, or — like this summer’s trickle — only released under pressure.

Like with many things, Trump lies about things whether they matter or not — which in this reason is something we should worry about. Small lies turn into big lies. Trump’s first-term presidential physician, Ronny Jackson, made outrageous claims about the president’s health — he might live to 200 years old! — was demoted by the navy afterward following a “scathing” investigation of his “inappropriate conduct” at the White House, and then was elected to Congress on a platform of being an uber Trump booster. Again, not exactly a great endorsement of how truthful the White House team has been about the president’s health.

Remember when Trump went to Walter Reed hospital unexpectedly in his first presidency and no one knew why? The reporting later showed that he was getting a colonoscopy but that his ego wouldn’t even allow him “anesthesia for the painful and invasive procedure because he didn’t want Vice President Mike Pence to take over temporarily as commander-in-chief and loathed showing any kind of weakness.” 

Similarly, we later came to understand that the president was in much more serious peril in 2020 when he was hospitalized for Covid-19 than the White House let on at the time.

This is not a man where we should trust anything coming out of the official White House channels.

4) Trump’s obviously diminished capacity. Sure, Trump has never been Churchillian in his speaking, but anyone who watches him now can see that he’s even less coherent and clear in his syntax and verbal flubs than he was. His West Point commencement speech barely was in English, and yet the media keeps pretending he’s just the same old Trump he’s always been. 

One of this summer’s main storylines after all has been Gavin Newsom’s social media team posting in the style of Donald Trump’s unhinged messages, trying to draw attention to the fact that we wouldn’t tolerate these rambling word salads from any other official in public life — and yet Trump, like with many things, gets some mulligan pass because he’s Trump.

Moreover, as Public Notice noted, he regularly appears to be struggling to stay awake in meetings (again: the type of thing that you’d think would warrant more intense follow-up reporting, but no!). Some of his verbal flubs — this past week he called Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer “Kristi Whitman”! — come and go with barely any notice, even though similar comments would have erupted into front-page stories in the Biden years.

5) The Swollen Ankles. One of the few things we do know about Trump’s health indicates that he either has heart disease or at least is at elevated risk of heart disease. This is perhaps not surprising for a 79-year-old man whose lifetime culinary tastes trend toward over-indulging in McDonald’s, who doesn’t meaningfully exercise, and who sleeps only 4-5 hours a night, but it is something that becomes the nation’s concern the moment he’s elected to the presidency. And now we have more reason to wonder about his circulation.

Trump’s ankles this summer have looked notably odd — swollen and unhealthy. Along with the bruised hands, the summer story of Trump’s ankles represent exactly a microcosm of the media arc of Trump’s health.

There was public evidence that something wasn’t right, which led to the White House belatedly releasing minimal explanation and dismissively saying that after evaluation the medical unit diagnosed him with chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), a leg vein issue.

The memo that was meant to answer all our questions was filled with “weasel words” that elicited no meaningful further investigation by the media. The memo from the White House naval physician said the swelling had occurred in “recent weeks” (How recent? When?) and was “thoroughly evaluated” and found to be “a benign and common condition, particularly in individuals over the age of 70.” There was no indication of how they addressed or treated his new diagnosis, and the White House physician hasn’t taken any questions from the press — as, again, is often typical when it comes to new concerns about the president’s health.

To me, what this episode indicates is that there’s no reason to believe that the White House will willingly and preemptively release new information or developments about Trump’s health without public pressure. Under normal circumstances, past presidents did release information about medical evaluations in real time.

The swollen-ankle episode to me says: What else is the White House not telling us about the president’s health?

6) The Biden Precedent. This, to me, is the strangest part of the national press corps’ near-total lack of apparent interest in the president’s health. We just saw a president hounded from office last year for being too old. And you know what? Trump is now the oldest person ever to take the oath of office — he was 78 years, 220 days of age, at his inauguration, four months older than Biden was. 

We’ve spent much of this year in a strange shame-cycle of self-flagellation over how the White House reporters missed or were complicit in the decline of Joe Biden in the presidency. The “Biden decline conspiracy” turned out to be wildly profitable for the reporters who allege it. Confronted with a similar scenario, barely a year later, you’d think reporters would be falling all over themselves to dig deeper right now.

You would think the Biden questions alone would cause them to put more effort into the “ground truth” of Trump’s health. In fact, the media didn’t miss Biden’s decline — we were treated to regular stories about Biden’s health, even the mostly speculative New York Times report last summer that a Parkinson’s expert had signed into the White House visitor logs eight times. We’ve seen nothing of that level of interest now with Trump.

Put all of this together, and it’s clear that there’s enough smoke coming from the White House to warrant at least a major story in a major outlet investigating whether there’s fire.

We’ve had presidents be incapacitated before — a spectrum that has ranged from Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack to Woodrow Wilson’s stroke to James Garfield lingering for 80 days before succumbing to infections that stemming from his shooting in 1881 to, well, Donald Trump getting Covid in 2020. 

We’ve never had a president face serious medical problems in an age as volatile as now. Should we be worried about Donald Trump’s health? We have no idea. And that should lead to more questions around the White House than it is.

Thanks for reading — if you have any of your own thoughts or angles of this story, and/or want to add me to your own group chats, I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal. That’s my normal username, everywhere, with an extra Vermont: the 14th state.

GMG

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