U.S. President Donald Trump celebrates his 80th birthday in June, and will do so amid questions about whether his physical health and mental sharpness are declining.
This week, Trump had his third medical exam since his return to the Oval Office 16 months ago and claimed in a social media post that “everything checked out PERFECTLY.”
In response to media queries about the appointment, a White House spokesperson said Trump is in excellent health and is “the sharpest and most accessible President in American history.”
A memo from his physician that was released by the White House on Friday also says Trump remains in excellent health following his exam, despite continuing to experience “slight lower leg swelling” and “benign” hand bruising.
These kinds of superlatives have been a common feature during his presidency, but they have only fuelled speculation about the true state of his fitness.
Dr. Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served as White House physician to presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, says Trump’s age is the number one factor in assessing his health.
“I think concern for the president’s physical health is probably at an all-time high,” Kuhlman told The Associated Press.
If Trump remains in office until August 2028, he will become the oldest person ever to serve as U.S. president, surpassing Joe Biden’s record age of 82 years and two months at the end of his term.
Biden’s own cognitive struggles during his time in office — and the extent to which his aides may have tried to cover them up — have only fuelled doubts about whether the Trump administration is being any more transparent.
Trump’s ‘visible health concerns’
There are no legal obligations for a president to tell the public about their health.
“I think we can expect very little disclosure about the true health status of any president unless they’re in perfect health,” said Sara Rosenthal, a bioethicist at the University of Kentucky who studies presidential health.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, says pilots, Secret Service agents and even school bus drivers have to pass annual medical exams, so he argues the commander-in-chief’s results ought to be made public.
“We should have a clear understanding that the president is fit for duty,” Reiner told CNN this week. He called for “a credible explanation for [Trump’s] visible health concerns.”
As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke at his side during a cabinet meeting on Dec. 2, 2025, President Donald Trump was seen repeatedly closing his eyes. Trump denied he had fallen asleep. ‘Look, it got pretty boring,’ he said at his next cabinet meeting in January. ‘I just closed them because I wanted to get the hell out of here.’
Over the past year, Trump’s outward appearance and signs of tiredness have prompted frequent public speculation about his health.
Last summer, Trump was seen to have visible swelling around his ankles. He has repeatedly been seen with deep-blue bruises on the backs of his hands.
Sleeping or blinking?
On a few occasions in front of TV cameras in recent months, Trump has appeared to close his eyes for lengthy stretches of time.
“The president has severe daytime somnolence, he falls asleep very often,” Reimer said.
The White House has vigorously pushed back on all claims that Trump has fallen asleep in meetings, including earlier this month.
As for the swelling, White House physician Dr. Sean Barbabella’s official explanation was that it is a symptom of chronic venous insufficiency, a condition common in older adults that causes blood to pool.
Barbabella attributed the bruising to a combination of Trump’s frequent hand-shaking and his use of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular problems.
More recently, bruising has been visible on Trump’s left hand, which is not the one he typically uses for hand-shaking.
Doctor praises Trump’s ‘active lifestyle’
Trump had an annual physical in April 2025, after which Barbabella declared the president to be in excellent health.
“His active lifestyle continues to contribute significantly to his well-being,” Barbabella wrote, taking particular note of Trump’s “frequent victories in golf events.”
Trump had another physical in October. He said he’d undergone an MRI, but neither he nor White House officials explained why. They later said the procedure was a CT scan.
Both MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and CT (computed tomography) provide detailed internal imagery for a wide range of diagnostic purposes. MRIs are more commonly used to scan the brain or search for inflammation or infection in soft tissue, while CT scans tend to be used for identifying fractures, blood clots or tumors, according to radiologists.
The state of Trump’s cognitive health has become a prickly issue.
Trump has long been known for a speaking style that he calls “the weave,” in which he veers from topic to topic. Of late, commenters have pointed out instances in which Trump’s words on a single topic have verged on incoherence.
Consider these three verbatim examples from one recent event, his televised cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
- On pharmaceutical prices: “That pill that I talked about would go from $10 to 20. The world is bigger than the U.S. Hard to believe, but it’s true. So it’s not like you cut it in the middle — you just had to go up a little bit. But a little bit is a doubling of a price. So a little bit’s a lot.”
- On renovating the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool: “The hard part’s done. And then we decided to do much more than we originally — what I originally — I thought I was just going to do the surface, but we said the problem is the outer ring looks pretty bad too, where you walk on. So we sandblasted that. This is all additional work we didn’t want to do. You know, when you do something like this, when you do the one, you think the other looked OK. But then, when the other — you see the new surface, the old stuff that looked OK looks really bad.”
- On deporting criminals: “By the way, 90 per cent of the crime is — calculated, they count — two per cent of the people do 90 per cent of the crime. That’s a great number. Because when you get rid of two per cent — two per cent you can get rid of, 90 per cent you can’t get rid of. Two per cent. So, two per cent create 90 per cent of the crime, 91 per cent actually, to be exact.”
In a letter submitted to Congress last month, more than 30 medical experts, including psychiatrists and neurologists, described “objectively observable signs of serious medical concern” for Trump.
The concerns they flagged included “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning” and “significant loss of self-control.”
Dementia screening test
Trump has repeatedly boasted about his mental fitness, including exaggerating the significance of passing a test that his doctor disclosed was the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a routine screening for dementia.
The White House physician reported Trump’s score as 30/30. A score below 26 is the threshold indicating cognitive impairment, indicating the possible onset of dementia.
“It’s actually a very hard test for a lot of people,” Trump said in March. “They get very tough mathematical equations and things.”
Boasts about Trump’s health from himself and his team date back to his entry into politics.
“His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,” gushed Trump’s then-physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, in a letter made public in December 2015 as he sought the Republican nomination.
“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can say unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” wrote the doctor, who admitted to CNN in 2020 that Trump had dictated the letter.
