General Discussion

After the appointment, Trump gave himself a clean bill of health and vowed to provide news organizations with a summary in “the next day or so.” That was on Tuesday. It wasn’t until Friday night — a time when the White House tends to release information it hopes the public will overlook — when there was some disclosure. MS NOW reported:

President Donald Trump’s physician declared him in “excellent health,” but recommended the president lose weight and exercise more following his latest physical exam.

“Cognitive and physical performance are excellent,” Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella wrote in his report released on Friday. “He is fully fit to carry out all duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State.”

At first blush, that might seem like a routine summary, but a closer look suggests three lingering problems with the developments.

What was in the report: The three-page report released by the White House included plenty of anodyne details, but it also added some curious elements. Barbabella, for example, stated that Trump has a “cardiac age” of a 65-year-old, based on the results of an “AI-enhanced electrocardiogram analysis.” It also pointed to “frequent handshaking” to explain the bruising that often appears on the president’s left and right hands.

Dr. Vin Gupta, a medical analyst for MS NOW, noted online, “When a President’s physicians start citing ‘AI cardiac age’ metrics and explaining bilateral bruising from ‘frequent handshaking,’ the line between medical documentation and political messaging disappears.”

What’s more, the same report from the White House noted that Trump also took another cognitive exam, the fourth of his presidency.....

What was not in the report: That the documentation released by the White House spanned three pages might give the impression of comprehensiveness, but that’s not quite right. The Wall Street Journal reported, for example, “The White House memorandum describing President Trump’s recent physical examination lacks details of the results of tests to assess his cardiovascular health, according to physicians who read the report. That is one of several areas of the report that doctors said stood out for its lack of specificity.”.....

The lengthy pattern: The problem started before Trump even took office. In late 2015, during the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Team Trump released an unintentionally hilarious four-paragraph letter from the late Dr. Harold Bornstein, asserting that Trump’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary” and that his lab tests results were “astonishingly excellent.” The doctor added at the time, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

We learned several months later that Bornstein wrote the letter in five minutes while a limo, dispatched by Trump, waited for the document.....

The president and his team, in other words, have had multiple opportunities to earn the benefit of the doubt about his personal health and medical history. They keep failing.