President Donald Trump
publicly contradicts a major policy position of his administration — the second time he does so in a week in which the White House has sought to beat back questions about his stability.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is getting his first medical checkup since taking office, a head-to-toe exam on Friday as questions swirl about the health and fitness of the oldest person ever elected to the nation’s highest office. In advance, the 71-year-old president has pushed back vigorously against suggestions he’s mentally unfit, declaring himself “a very stable genius.”
Trump raised concern last month when he slurred some words on national TV. When asked about it, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said questions about Trump’s health were “frankly, pretty ridiculous” and blamed his slurred speech on a dry throat.
More questions have been raised in the weeks since, given the tone of some of his tweets and the reported comments of some of the people who deal with him day to day. Some were recently published in a new book about his first year, which Sanders denounced as “complete fantasy” for its portrayal of Trump as undisciplined, child-like and in over his head.
Trump was 70 when he was inaugurated a year ago to handle the around-theclock demands of president. Ronald Reagan, who served two terms, was a year younger when he took office in 1981.
The president is to fly by helicopter Friday to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington in Bethesda, Md., for the exam.
There is no requirement for a president to have a physical, but modern officeholders undergo them regularly and release a doctor’s report stating that they are “fit for duty.”
Trump will not undergo a psychiatric exam, the White House said. Officials did not address a different type of screening, assessments of cognitive status that examine neurological functions including memory. Cognitive assessments aren’t routine in standard physicals, although they recently became covered in Medicare’s annual wellness visits for seniors.
Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, a Navy rear admiral who is the president’s official physician and director of the White House Medical Unit, is coordinating the exam. Jackson provided care for President Barack Obama, conducting and supervising the last of three physicals Obama had during his eight years in office.
How much of Trump’s health information the public gets to see is up to him, but Sanders said she expects him to release the same kind of details as past presidents.
In September 2016, during the presidential campaign, Trump released a five-paragraph letter from Dr. Harold Bornstein, his longtime physician, in which the gastroenterologist concluded that Trump “is in excellent physical health.”
The letter put Trump’s blood pressure and cholesterol measurements in the healthy range, but he does use a cholesterol-lowering statin medication. His EKG, chest X-ray, echocardiogram and blood sugar were normal. The 6-foot-3 Trump weighed 236 pounds, and his body mass index, or BMI, of 29.5 put him in the category of being overweight for his height.
Trump takes Crestor for his cholesterol, a low-dose aspirin for heart attack prevention, Propecia to treat male-pattern baldness and antibiotics for rosacea.
Trump leads a largely sedentary lifestyle compared to his most recent predecessors, who were significantly younger than him when they took office. Trump has said he gets most of his exercise from playing golf, which he does most weekends. As for his diet, Trump enjoys fast food, steaks well-done and with ketchup, chocolate cake and double scoops of vanilla ice cream, and reportedly downs 12 Diet Cokes a day.
In a series of interviews last year, Trump showed journalists how he summons a butler to bring him a soda by pressing a red button on his Oval Office desk. In a recent book, “Let Trump Be Trump,” former top campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie described the four major food groups on Trump’s campaign plane as “McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza and Diet Coke.”
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland introduced a bill in April to create a commission that would study whether the president was mentally or physically unable to perform his duties. Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California followed in August with a resolution urging the vice president and Cabinet to have Trump undergo exams to assess his competence. Neither measure has advanced in Congress.