Recent questions about Donald Trump’s health were hardly unreasonable. The president has, for example, appeared to fall asleep at a couple of White House events, which roughly coincided with a series of exchanges in which he struggled with questions about an MRI he claimed to have had in October, telling reporters he had “no idea” which part of his body was scanned.
Complicating matters, after observers noticed bruises on the Republican’s right hand, the official White House line for months was that frequent handshakes led to discoloration — which seemed vaguely plausible until the problem spread to his left hand.
While it’s possible that there was no cause for concern, Trump’s unfortunate record made it difficult to give him and his team the benefit of the doubt. It was against this backdrop that the president spoke to The Wall Street Journal about these questions, and his comments advanced the story in weird and unexpected ways. From the report:
President Trump is taking more aspirin than his doctors recommend. He briefly tried wearing compression socks for his swelling ankles, but stopped because he didn’t like them. And he regrets undergoing advanced imaging because it generated scrutiny of his health.
‘In retrospect, it’s too bad I took it because it gave them a little ammunition,’ Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on his decision to get a cardiovascular and abdominal scan in October.
Broadly speaking, there are a handful of key takeaways from the reporting and interview.
Right off the bat, after months in which Trump and the White House said the president received an MRI during a physical exam in October, Trump has changed his story, telling the Journal it was a CT scan. “It wasn’t an MRI,” he said. The article added, “Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, Trump’s doctor, confirmed in a statement to the Journal that Trump had received a CT scan.”
I have no idea whether this revised story is true, though taken at face value, it’s curious that it took the White House three months to clear this up.
As for recent instances in which he appeared to be sleeping during official events, Trump, the oldest elected president in American history, said he had simply been photographed “blinking.” (There’s reason to believe otherwise.)
The president, the Journal went on to report, “has at times eschewed the advice of his doctors and scoffed at the medical community’s widely accepted health recommendations.” This is especially true when it comes to aspirin, which he chooses to take daily and which apparently causes him to bruise easily. In fact, the president acknowledged applying makeup to his hands to obscure discoloration.
“His skin is so delicate that Pam Bondi, now his attorney general, caused his hand to bleed when she nicked him with her ring while giving him a high-five at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee,” the article noted.
“Sometimes,” my MS NOW colleague Hayes Brown noted, “metaphors just write themselves.”
But of particular interest is why Trump ignores his physicians’ recommendations on daily aspirin doses. He initially told the Journal that he’s been taking it for 25 years and is therefore reluctant to stop. “I’m a little superstitious,” the president said. He then went further. “They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart,” Trump said. “I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?” It was probably a rhetorical question, but the answer is no, it does not. Stepping back, the president’s comments were hardly out of character. Throughout his decadelong political career, Trump has repeatedly expressed his disdain for science and medical evidence on everything from the climate crisis to vaccines to Covid-19 treatments, so it stands to reason that Mr. Inject Disinfectants is going to prioritize his superstitions and baseless assumptions about “nice, thin blood” over the recommendations of those who know what they’re talking about. The trouble is, this is the same president who believes he has the credibility and expertise needed to give the public guidance on, among other things, how much Tylenol to take and what child vaccination schedules should look like. In other words, Trump’s comments to the Journal weren’t just important in their own right, they were also a timely reminder to the public that his judgment on matters related to health are better left ignored. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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