The oldest elected US president is turning 80, but it’s not Trump’s age that has medical experts worried – The Independent
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Health experts tell Rhian Lubin their concerns over the 79-year-old commander-in-chief run deeper than all those apparent physical ailments that have cropped up in the past year
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President Donald Trump turns 80 on Sunday, following more than a year of exhibiting visible symptoms typical for an octogenarian, including bruising on his hands, swollen ankles and legs, and appearing to nod off during meetings and high-profile events.
Medical experts warn, though, that it’s not so much these obvious symptoms and his age that Americans should be most concerned about, but the conduct and behavior on display during his second presidency.
“It’s not that he’s 80, but let’s not ignore the red flags on the field,” Dr. Henry Abraham, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, told The Independent. “There are people in their 80s and 90s who have all their marbles.”
But Abraham, who stressed he has never examined the president in person and was not offering a diagnosis, is seriously alarmed that Trump has access to the nuclear codes.
“If you just look at everything that he’s said and done, and has been observed doing over, really, decades, certain signs and symptoms emerge which are warning flags regarding the conduct of his presidency going forward,” he said.
“Poor impulse control, poor control over his rage, sleeplessness at night, unrelenting aggression toward his perceived enemies,” Abraham said. “Well, put all that together and give him the nuclear football, and you can see why we’re worried.”
The White House did not acknowledge questions about the president’s health when reached for comment by The Independent, but dismissed the concerns of medical experts in a statement.
“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” said White House spokesman Davis Ingle. “President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history and any so-called medical professionals engaging in armchair diagnosis or false speculation for political purposes are clearly breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’ve sworn to.”
Over the past year, speculation over Trump’s health has been fueled by pictures of his bruised hands, swollen ankles and a rash on his neck.
In March, Trump was pictured with what appeared to be a bright red rash on the side of his neck that spread from his ear to the back of his head. “President Trump is using a very common cream on the right side of his neck, which is a preventative skin treatment, prescribed by the White House Doctor,” the president’s physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, said in a statement to The Independent at the time.
And last year, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shared that Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency after his lower legs appeared to be swollen in pictures, sparking questions over his health. The condition occurs when leg veins become damaged and struggle to send blood back up to the heart, causing blood to pool in your legs and swelling.
Leavitt also addressed bruising on Trump’s hands, which she explained was because of “frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin, which is taken as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen.”
Dr. Rosanne Leipzig, professor emerita of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told The Independent that she was “not overly concerned” about any of these symptoms, which are all common in older people. “He’s taking too much aspirin and older people’s skin gets thinner,” she said of the bruises.
“You lose the fat underneath the skin, so you’re much more likely to bruise. And anybody who spent time during their life standing up for a while has a problem in terms of their venous enlargement,” she said of the swelling.
Trump appears to have set another new bar last month as part of his medical exam when he was reportedly screened by 22 specialists, nearly doubling the number from his past check-ups. By comparison, Biden was seen by a team of 20 doctors at his 2024 medical evaluation, while George W. Bush was seen by 12 in his first presidential check-up, according to The Washington Post.
Barbabella wrote after the May health exam that Trump “remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological and overall physical function.”
Jeffrey Kuhlman, the White House physician to former President Barack Obama, points out that there is no constitutional requirement for presidents to share their medical information. “Trump as an individual is protected by HIPAA and can choose to disclose or not disclose any medical information he chooses,” Kuhlman told The Independent.
The annual physical examination in theory provides Trump with “a candid assessment to the American people of his physical ability to serve,” Kuhlman, the author of Transforming Presidential Healthcare, explained.
But critics said the memorandum released by the White House detailing the results of Trump’s medical exam lacks crucial details and doesn’t provide Americans with the whole picture.
“His medical evaluation is a somewhat superficial way of looking at whether he is competent to hold an office,” said Leipzig, the author of Honest Aging: An Insider’s Guide to the Second Half of Life.
“I would guess that the questions people would want answered from something like this are: Is he likely to be able to live out his term? Or is he likely to have some sort of a debilitating medical problem, a major stroke, or something like that,” Leipzig said, emphasizing that she has not examined the president and is not offering a diagnosis.
“I think it’s pretty clear from the test that they did that physically he appears to be — if you believe everything that’s in here — in reasonable shape,” Leipzig said. “The stuff that I most worry about here is the mental status exam.”
Abraham and Leipzig were part of a group of 36 medical professionals who signed a letter last month, warning that, in their opinions, Trump was “increasingly a danger to the public.”
Abraham, who has expressed concerns over Trump’s cognitive ability on his Substack, shares Leipzig’s concern over the president’s mental status exam. “The 22 doctors who examined this man, where are they? What have they found? What did they say?” he asked.
He questioned Trump’s “perfect scores” on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a common test used to diagnose dementia. According to Barbabella’s memo, Trump scored 30 out of 30 on the short test.
“Who gets three or four [assessments] in 18 months?” Abraham said. “That’s clinically not indicated. We should follow it up with much more careful, exhaustive neuropsychological evaluations, and if they’ve been done, great. Let the horse out of the barn, and let’s see what color the horse is.”
“If you’re really concerned about cognition, you need a more in-depth set of tests,” Leipzig added. She said that when carrying out these tests, doctors will also learn about a patient through their appearance, behavior, eye contact, posture, their speech and mood. The geriatrician said that Barbabella’s note “didn’t really talk about” what Trump’s mood was like that day or “where he’s at.”
Looking back at footage of Trump from 30 years ago, he was using sophisticated language and words with many syllables, Abraham noted. “None of that is present now,” he said.
Another red flag for Abraham is potential confabulation—when someone unintentionally creates false memories—as during Trump’s long-winded and meandering speeches. “Is the president delusional, or is he confabulating?” Abraham asked. “I can’t answer that question, but I do know that it’s a red flag.”
Abraham acknowledged the “enormous stresses physically” that comes with being in office, but doesn’t agree with introducing an upper age limit on the presidency. Instead, he suggested an “honest, transparent assessment of physical and cognitive status before one even becomes president.”
Leipzig explained that as a person ages, it affects the amount of their physiological reserve — the ability to maintain physical functioning despite age, illness, or injury. “When you’re a kid, you’ve got lots. As you get older, you use more and more of that to do your daily functions,” she said. “So for anybody, as they get older, they’re more likely to have a bad outcome from any stress that occurs.”
“I think what he’s fooling himself on is that his body has aged,” Leipzig added. “He cannot do now what he could do 20 years ago.”
Lately, videos have emerged of Trump appearing to fall asleep during meetings and events. At Monday’s Knicks-Spurs NBA championship game at Madison Square Garden, cameras zoomed in on the president looking as though he had nodded off again in the luxury suite.
Trump, who maintained he has always gotten by on little sleep, often goes on late-night Truth Social sprees, sometimes posting during the middle of the night and again first thing in the morning.
Leipzig said sleep patterns do change as people age, but in Trump’s case, staying up late into the early morning hours on Truth Social is not the norm for an 80-year-old. “There are changes in sleep patterns as you get older. This is not one of them,” Leipzig said of the president’s social media habits. “People are not usually up all night and falling asleep during the day in important meetings where people are looking at them.” The recommended sleep time for a man of Trump’s age is between 7 to 8 hours per night, Leipzig added.
But the average amount of sleep presidents get is between four and five hours per night, Abraham pointed out. “It’s a busy job, and the world is going crazy, and it’s your job to try to keep things under control,” he said, calling Trump’s lack of sleep “understandable.”
“The first question that comes to my mind, besides the fact that he’s normally aging and maybe being up at night physiologically, is does he have a sleep disorder?” Abraham said. “Does he have sleep apnea?”
Above all, Abraham said he is most concerned with how the president exhibits “a degree of self‐absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus,” quoting the playwright Tom Stoppard. “That describes the president to a tee.”
“Besides [being] self-absorbed, he has a grandiose, omnipotent view of himself,” Abraham continued. “‘I can do anything I want,’ he said. Well, that includes starting a nuclear war.”
When Trump was asked on Wednesday what he would like for his 80th birthday, he paused.
“Peace for the world, OK? Peace for the world,” he said, the same day he threatened to “bomb the s***” out of Iran.
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