When I arrived at the Oval Office in December to talk to Donald Trump about his health, the president was standing next to a couple of men clutching pieces of paper labeled TALKING POINTS.
“These
are two doctors,” Trump told me before I could ask a question. “And by
the way, I don’t know them, they’re not my best friends. They’re
respected doctors that practice out of Walter Reed. And they happen to
be taking care of me for anything — but I don’t need any taking care of
because I’m in perfect health. I do purposely every year or less a
physical, because I think the American people should know that the
president is healthy so you don’t get a guy like the last one, who was
the worst thing that ever happened to older people. Because I know
people in their 90s that are 100 percent. Gary Player is 90 years old.
He shot 70 with me the other day.”
Trump gestured at everyone present — me, the doctors, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt — to follow him into the room.
“Let’s
sit for a couple of minutes,” he said. “I hate to waste a lot of time
on this, but if you’re going to write a bad story about my health, I’m
going to sue the ass off of New York Magazine. There will be a
time when you can write that story, maybe in two years, three years,
five years — five years, no one is going to care, I guess. Go ahead and
sit down.”
Despite
the president’s protests, the White House realizes that the time to
talk about his health is now. Speculation about his fitness for office
is rampant; armchair physicians have given him months and sometimes even
days to live. “That right there looks like a leg bag for a urinary
catheter,” a physical therapist claimed in an Instagram with 19 million
views, pointing to a bulge in Trump’s pants. In recent months, Trump has
been caught seeming to fall asleep during public events, making him the
butt of recurring jokes on The Onion (“Trump Appears to Doze During
Stroke”). His right hand is constantly bruised
and often bandaged. In July, his ankles swelled up like the Michelin
Man, a symptom, his doctors said, of “chronic venous insufficiency” — a
common circulatory condition. In August, when Trump took a break from
public appearances for a few days, “Trump Is Dead” began trending on
social media. “I got calls from friends that said, ‘Thank God you picked
up the phone,’” Trump told me. “‘Because there’s a report that you
died.’”
In
September, Trump made headlines at a 9/11 memorial event because the
right side of his face appeared “droopy”; in October, he went to Walter
Reed and received what he said was an MRI,
and when asked why, he suspiciously couldn’t recall which part of his
body had been imaged; on New Year’s Eve, he was spotted apparently
limping into a black-tie party at Mar-a-Lago; in January, his mental
fitness was called into question when he demanded control of Greenland because he hadn’t been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, prompting calls for Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment; and later that month, he showed up in Davos with a new bruise on his left hand.
That
Trump couldn’t stop talking about his “perfect health” at rallies and
on Truth Social only convinced people something was wrong. That he
started making jokes about how he wasn’t on track to get into Heaven
only added more fodder for conspiracy theorists. And the fact that his
predecessor in the Oval Office began his disastrous decline at around
the same age has only made the questions surrounding Trump’s health more
palpably urgent.
“I feel the same as I did 40 years ago,” he said, settling in behind the Resolute
desk. Warm afternoon light from the window illuminated his famous hair,
once dyed golden and now its natural white — his “only concession to
age,” one of his senior staffers told me. In person, Trump looks trimmer
than he does on television, though he denies he’s ever been on a GLP-1
or, as he calls it, “the fat drug.” (His last physical, this past April,
listed him as weighing 224 pounds, but he told me he’s currently “about
235.”) He stands a little hunched and his eyes are puffy, but he looks
pretty good for a 79-year-old. His hearing, according to a senior staff
member, isn’t what it used to be (the staffer doesn’t think Trump has
noticed this about himself, despite regularly leaning in and requesting
people speak up). His right hand, warm and soft during our handshake,
looked like rhino hide on the back: dry and gray, the notorious bruise
spread out like an inkblot test.
The
president’s discolored hand has become something of a smoking gun for
those on Donald Trump Deathwatch, evidence, perhaps, that he’s getting
surreptitious IVs to treat an undisclosed illness. “They’re looking very
Queen Elizabeth–esque,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller has said, referring to
photos of her Royal Highness’s bruised hands shortly before she died.
It doesn’t help that Trump covers the bruise
with a large dollop of makeup and can seem testy when people bring up
the subject. Late last year, a Republican operative showed Trump his own
hand injury to try to relate. “He wasn’t amused,” the operative told
me. When Trump met with the much younger Zohran Mamdani in the Oval Office
in November, I watched up close as Trump spent the public portion of
the meeting shielding the bruise with his left hand. On occasion he
would sneak a peek at the mark as if checking the time.
“This
is only from shaking hands,” he said now, rubbing his left thumb over
the back of his right hand, a claim he would repeat to other
journalists. Trump turned to the doctors, Captain Sean Barbabella, his
lead physician, and Colonel James Jones, a physician’s assistant with a
Ph.D. in health science.
“Can you just verify that?” he said.
“Absolutely,”
said Barbabella, a short man with close-cropped hair and a nervous
smile. “I’ve seen the president shaking hands for over an hour.” Trump
held up his non-shaking hand. “Look, this one’s perfect,” he said.
“People say, ‘What beautiful skin you have.’” (The White House said the
bruise that appeared on his left hand in Davos was caused by him hitting
it against a table corner. Trump also blamed women’s fingernails and
rings for the cuts on his right hand, including one particularly nasty
“slice” that came from a botched high five with Attorney General Pam
Bondi.)
It
would be easy, Trump said, to stop the bruising and end the rumors of
his imminent demise. All he would have to do is stop taking so much
aspirin, which he claims is necessary to prevent his blood from becoming too thick.
“I want thin blood,” he said. “Real thin blood.” In 2016, Trump shocked
executives from a major pharmaceutical company when he told them he
took 325 milligrams of the company’s aspirin each day. “You shouldn’t be
taking that much,” one of the executives said, according to a person
familiar with his comments. “Do your doctors know?” Trump said they did
and didn’t approve. “But it works for me,” he said. He told me, “I’ve
been doing it for 30 years, and I don’t want to change. You know what?
You’re in the Oval Office now, right? I don’t want to change a thing.”
Rather than change, Trump tends to force the world to adapt to him. If there was a conspiracy of silence protecting Joe Biden
when questions arose about his mental and physical decline, there’s a
cacophony around Trump. Numerous members of his inner circle have
clamored to tell me tales of the president’s godlike virility. “He can
work harder and he has a better memory and he has more stamina and has
more energy than a normal mortal,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told me. “The headline of your story should be ‘The Superhuman President.’”
These
strenuous assertions came alongside signs that made Trump seem more
mortal than ever, from his dismal approval rating to the growing
likelihood that Republicans will lose control of at least one chamber of
Congress in this fall’s midterms. Already, pundits have started calling
him a lame duck, a term typically saved for the third year of a
presidency, which might partly explain the vigorous flurry of activity
he has undertaken in Nigeria, Venezuela, Minneapolis, Greenland, and beyond. He has gamely entertained discussions about whether Marco Rubio or J. D. Vance
will succeed him, which in one sense is an acknowledgment of his
mortality. In another sense, the succession represents a way for him to
live forever — a conceit, I soon learned, that was perpetuated by the
bubble of loyalists and supplicants and advisers that constantly
surrounds him and that seemed indicative of the late-empire stage of
Trump’s decade-plus-long dominance of American life.
“Real fast,” Trump said, turning to the doctors in the room. “Is my health perfect?”
“Your health is excellent, sir,” Jones said.....
The bit about Secretary of State (former acting director USAID and acting director National Archives) Rubio trying to get some sleep on Air Force One is pretty funny.
