WH doctor: Trump in ‘excellent health’

Washington — President Donald Trump's White House physician declared him in “excellent health” after the president received his first medical checkup at Walter Reed military hospital on Friday, undergoing a physical examination amid suggestions in a recent book and by his detractors that he's mentally unfit.

Dr. Ronny Jackson, in a statement released by the White House, said the examination “went exceptionally well. The President is in excellent health and I look forward to briefing some of the details on Tuesday.” Trump spent about three hours at the medical facility in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington, for the Friday afternoon checkup, his first as president, before departing for Florida for the weekend.

The fairly routine exam for previous presidents has taken on outsized importance in the age of Trump, given the tone of some of his tweets, comments attributed to some of his close advisers and Trump's recent slurring of words on national TV.

Some of the comments were published in a new book about Trump's first year, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” by Michael Wolff, which White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has denounced as “complete fantasy” for portraying her 71-year-old boss as undisciplined and in over his head as president.

Trump himself has pushed back hard against any suggestion that he's mentally unfit, declaring himself “a very stable genius.” He told reporters on Thursday that he expected the exam “to go very well. I'll be very surprised if it doesn't.”

The examination lasted several hours and measured things like Trump's blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, heart rate and weight. The White House did not provide specific results of those tests. Jackson, who also provided care for President Barack Obama and became a White House physician in 2006, is expected to provide a detailed readout of the exam on Tuesday and answer questions from reporters.

But conclusions about Trump's mental acuity were not expected. The White House said Trump would not undergo a psychiatric exam. Officials did not address a different type of screening: assessments of cognitive status that examine neurologic functions including memory.