Doctor declared Trump ‘healthiest ever’ – then admitted his words were dictated
Harold Bornstein, Donald Trump’s former personal physician, who has died aged 73, hit the headlines in 2015 when he issued a letter claiming the 69-year-old, overweight, junk-food-eating would-be Republican candidate would ‘‘unequivocally’’ be ‘‘the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency’’ – only to say later that the letter was dictated by Trump.
Bornstein, a gastroenterologist, was Trump’s doctor from 1980 until early 2017, when the president took office. Trump had earlier been a patient of Bornstein’s father, Jacob, who brought his son into his practice on New York’s Upper East Side.
Before his letter extolling Trump’s physical fitness,
Bornstein had a low profile and was known mostly for his shoulder-length hair, love of Italian literature, and occasional forays into poetry. Several of the Trump family were his patients.
As Trump was launching his presidential campaign, he said in a tweet on December 3, 2015, that he had ‘‘instructed my long-time doctor’’ to issue a report on his health and that ‘‘it will show perfection’’. Bornstein’s fourparagraph letter was released about two weeks later but was dated December 4, one day after Trump’s tweet. Trump, who was 70 when he was elected, was the oldest first-time president in United States history at the time. Joe Biden is 78.
‘‘I love steak and hamburger and pasta and french fries – all the things we shouldn’t be eating,’’ Trump said in 2015. He also said his chief form of exercise was speaking at campaign events.
In the letter, Bornstein said Trump had lost at least 15lb (about 7kg) in the preceding year, without stating his weight. ‘‘His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,’’ he wrote. He noted that Trump’s blood pressure (110/65) and other tests were ‘‘astonishingly excellent’’ and that his examination ‘‘showed only positive results’’.
The letter concluded with the sweeping statement that Trump would be ‘‘the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency’’. Sceptics questioned whether a medical doctor could have written such an effusive letter. The phrase ‘‘positive results’’ particularly stood out, because physicians almost always describe benign results of medical tests as ‘‘negative’’.
In September 2016, when the campaign was in full swing, Bornstein released a second letter attesting to Trump’s robust health. He expressed interest in staying on as Trump’s personal physician, should he be elected. He attended his inauguration.
On February 2, 2017, however, the New York Times published an interview in which Bornstein said Trump took several medicines, including Propecia, designed to arrest malepattern
‘‘I am probably the only person in the world who has every phone number for him and all the wives.’’
Harold Bornstein on Donald Trump
baldness. The next day, three men came to Bornstein’s office in what he called ‘‘a raid’’. He identified two of them as Keith Schiller, Trump’s longtime bodyguard, and Alan Garten, a lawyer. He didn’t know the third man.
They took Trump’s medical records from his office, Bornstein said, including those under various aliases Trump used. As a parting shot, they told the doctor he could no longer display a photograph of himself standing with Trump. In a later phone call with another of Trump’s assistants, Bornstein said he was told, ‘‘So you wanted to be the White House doctor? Forget it, you’re out.’’
Bornstein waited more than a year before going public about the encounter. In a separate interview with CNN, he said the original 2015 letter was Trump’s idea.
‘‘He dictated that whole letter. I didn’t write that letter.’’
Harold Nelson Bornstein was born in New York, and graduated from Tufts University medical school in 1975, specialising in gastroenterology. A hippyish figure (he was proud of ‘‘refusing to have the conservative beard and haircut that my parents thought was necessary for success’’), he wrote poetry under the nom de plume Count Harold.
His father had lived close to Trump’s childhood home and became his personal doctor. Bornstein joined his father’s practice and inherited his most famous patient in 1980. He had several other members of the family on his books, once boasting: ‘‘I am probably the only person in the world who has every phone number for him and all the wives.’’ He liked Trump, he said, ‘‘because I think he likes me’’.
His 2015 letter, however, made Bornstein, whose business cards bore the legend ‘‘dottore molto famoso’’ (‘‘very famous doctor’’), the butt of satirists, with Jim Carrey tweeting a cartoon of him as a ‘‘Hippocratic oaf’’.
Bornstein is survived by his third wife, Melissa, and by four sons and a daughter. – Washington Post/Telegraph Group