In mid-August, Donald Trump spoke briefly with CBS News, which asked the former president a good question. “You will release your medical records to the public?” correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns asked the Republican.
“Oh sure,” Trump replied. “I would do that very gladly, sure.”
At that point, the GOP candidate proceeded to talk about his “perfect score” on a cognitive test — a subject he has long struggled to understand — and his belief that every candidate should take one.
Nearly seven weeks later, The New York Times reported that the elusive medical records remain under wraps.
[J]ust over a month from an election that could make Mr. Trump, 78, the oldest person ever to serve as president (82 years, 7 months and 6 days when his term would end in January 2029), he is refusing to release even the most basic information about his health. If he wins, Mr. Trump could enter the Oval Office with an array of potentially worrisome issues, medical experts say: cardiac risk factors, possible aftereffects from the July assassination attempt and the cognitive decline that naturally comes with age, among others.
Well, sure, if you put it that way, it sounds bad.
It’s true that Election Day 2024 is still 32 days away, and it’s at least possible that the Republican nominee will follow through on his earlier promises related to transparency. But I wouldn’t count on it: As regular readers know, Trump has long adopted a rather untraditional approach to sharing medical information.
It started before he 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.
In the years that followed, disclosures did not improve — even when the then-president was hospitalized with a Covid infection. Last fall, Trump released the first updated report on his health in more than three years, but it came by way of a statement issued by one of his golf club customers, and it omitted basic details such as his blood pressure and medications. More recently, the former president and his team also ignored calls for basic medical details after he was shot in the ear. It’s against this backdrop that Trump said nearly seven weeks ago that he would “very gladly” release his medical records, which will probably reach the public right around the time he releases his tax returns. 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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