Report: Former White House doctor, Trump ally was demoted by Navy
In a report completed three years ago, the Pentagon found that Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson had mistreated subordinates while serving as the White House physician and drank and took sleeping pills on the job. The report recommended that he face discipline.
Now it turns out that the Navy quietly punished him the next year. Though he had retired from the military in 2019, he was demoted to captain — a sanction that he has not publicly acknowledged.
Jackson, now a Republican congressman from Texas and an outspoken ally of former President Donald Trump, whose care he supervised in the White House, still refers to himself as a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral on his congressional website.
According to a former defense official and a current military official, Jackson
was demoted from rear admiral to captain in 2022. Jackson could not be reached for comment. His lawyer, declined to comment.
A Navy official said only that the findings led the Navy to take administrative actions against Jackson. The official would not say what those actions were.
The findings of the internal investigation suggest Jackson’s
behavior was “not in keeping with the standards the Navy requires of its leaders,” the Navy said in a statement, “And, as such, the secretary of the Navy took administrative action in July 2022.”
A demotion of this type, even after retirement, is a significant blow in military circles, especially for someone who had been entrusted to be a physician to both Trump and President Barack Obama.
The demotion reduces Jackson’s annual retirement pay by about 13%, according to military pay scales.
When the former president was indicted in New York last year for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, Jackson lashed out at Democrats on social media. “These cowardly Democrats HATE Trump and HATE his voters even more,” he wrote. “When Trump wins, THESE PEOPLE WILL PAY!!”
In his 2022 memoir, “Holding the Line,” Jackson referred to himself as a “Trump person” and noted that he had stood by the president after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In early 2018, while serving as the White House physician, he delivered a public assessment that Trump, then 71, was in excellent health, without providing details like his cholesterol levels or blood pressure.