President Donald Trump’s closely watched physical on Friday continued a long tradition of scrutiny over the health of the U.S. president, one that has been exacerbated due to the advanced age of recent White House occupants.
Trump’s predecessor, former President Joe Biden, was the oldest man ever elected president, and his deteriorating health has become a public scandal now that he is out of office and former aides are coming clean. But Trump, who turns 79 in June, overtook the title of the oldest president ever inaugurated, increasing attention on his routine physicals even while he appears to be in good health.
“I have never felt better,” Trump posted on Truth Social while announcing the physical, “but nevertheless, these things must be done!”
Trump’s physical on Friday was conducted at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and his team promised glowing results.
“I can confirm the president is in very good shape, as you see on a near-daily basis here,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Friday, responding to a friendly reporter who brought up Trump’s weight loss.
But others have questioned Trump’s health, especially his mental acuity, and Democrats made a go of turning it into a campaign issue last fall.
Even before Trump took the physical, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) claimed his tariffs were “crazy work” and questioned his mental health.
“This crazy tariff war … like, the fact that nobody is questioning his mental acuity or fitness to serve is beyond wild to me, right?” Crockett said on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes. “Like, this is crazy work. For no reason.”
Friday’s medical report is unlikely to allay those concerns, partly because presidents are entitled to medical privacy and do not have to disclose any information they don’t want to.
“There is no Constitutional or federal requirement to have a physical or any physical qualifications [to be president],” said Dr. Jeff Kuhlman, a physician in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. “The patient has medical privacy, and the president personally has to authorize the release of the information. If there is something he chooses not to release, that’s his right.”
Kuhlman, who recently penned a book called Transforming Presidential Healthcare: Ensuring Comprehensive Care for the Commander in Chief Amid 21st Century Threats, helped perform the physicals for former President George W. Bush and former President Barack Obama. He described the process as “nothing secret or sexy,” consisting of a routine check of height and weight, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and a look at the eyes, ears, nose, and throat, followed by the heart, lungs, abdomen, and digestive system.
Presidential health throughout history
There were multiple scandals before presidents began releasing annual physicals in the late 1970s, though issuing them hasn’t done much to stem the tide of rumors and whispers in the years since.
Biden’s health, for example, was the subject of speculation even before he took office, but it is far from the worst health outcome in presidential history.
President William Henry Harrison, the nation’s ninth president, died in office just one month after being sworn in, serving between March 4 and April 4, 1841. Harrison fell ill days after being sworn in, but there was never a public announcement regarding his sickness before he died, leading to a swirl of rumors and speculative newspaper stories.
It wouldn’t be the last time a U.S. president tried to conceal his ailments.
President Grover Cleveland, the only president other than Trump to serve two non-consecutive terms, was more successful in avoiding public scrutiny. Shortly after taking office in 1893, Cleveland noticed a bump in the roof of his mouth that turned out to be a tumor. He decided to have it secretly removed.
Aboard a yacht during a scheduled “vacation cruise,” surgeons operated on Cleveland’s mouth, successfully removing the bump in only 90 minutes. Though the operation left his face somewhat disfigured, it remained a secret for 24 years before one of the doctors finally came clean in a newspaper story. Cleveland finished his second term with no further health problems.
The 20th century was littered with presidential health scares, some better concealed than others.
President Woodrow Wilson endured a stroke and left his wife as the de facto president for nearly two years. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wheelchair was famously hidden from the public, though his ailment was not necessarily a secret, just considered uncouth to talk about.
Partially in response to the health secrecy that surrounded Roosevelt, President Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigned on a promise of transparency and followed through by disclosing a heart attack he suffered in 1955, though he still downplayed the severity of it.
His successor, President John F. Kennedy, was one of the youngest presidents but also one of the sickest, dealing with Addison’s disease, a bad back, and even legs that were not the same length.
“His brother joked that if a mosquito bit JFK, the mosquito would die,” presidential historian Craig Shirley said. “He was very handsome, but health-wise, he was a basket case.”
Things began to change in the 1960s and 1970s when a general interest in government transparency began to seep into the presidency.
“After Vietnam and Watergate, we now had a culture of exposure, disclosure, and revelation,” Rutgers University history professor David Greenberg said.
“There was a great deal of speculation about the mental health of [President] Lyndon Baines Johnson, and even more so [President] Richard Nixon,” he continued. “I have a whole chapter in my book [Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image] about this. People came to see the president’s maladies as linked to the country’s maladies, and the president’s concealment of health issues as connected to his willingness to conceal wrongdoing.”
After the Watergate scandal knocked Nixon out of office, President Jimmy Carter began the practice of releasing an annual presidential physical, which all of his successors have continued to varying degrees.
“Carter jogged every day and was in good shape,” Shirley said. “Presidential exercise became more important starting with Carter. You didn’t know about presidential exercise before that. Nixon would go bowling, [President] Calvin Coolidge might have played tennis, but it didn’t become an issue until the advent of television.”
President Ronald Reagan performed mental acuity tests every year, though that didn’t stop speculation about his memory toward the end of his second term.
Former President Bill Clinton — aside from famously jogging to McDonald’s — Bush, and Obama were all relatively healthy presidents. Trump began the recent phenomenon of sending senior citizens to the White House when he was elected in 2016 at age 70.
Old men in the executive mansion
Trump caused a mini-scandal by releasing a statement on the 2016 campaign trail from gastroenterologist Dr. Harold Bornstein.
“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” it read. It was later reported that Trump dictated the statement himself.
Trump’s health continued to stir debate during his first term. His physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, told the press in 2018 that “if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.” Jackson is now a Republican U.S. Representative and openly criticized Biden’s health throughout his presidency.
“Every day, [Biden] does have a cognitive test,” Jackson said last year, “and every day, he fails miserably.”
Jackson was not involved with Trump’s 2025 physical, his office told the Washington Examiner.
Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, never directly addressed the media, though the positive bills of health he gave his boss each year attracted plenty of scrutiny.
“He continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations,” reads a summary of the physical’s findings in 2024. While health-related questions surrounding Biden mostly dealt with his mental health and memory, O’Connor’s analysis centered mainly on his physical health.
Trump agreed to a mental health assessment during his first term and may do so again during Friday’s physical.
Kuhlman, the former White House physician, says he has no reason to doubt Trump’s mental fitness at the moment, though he added that such tests only cover basic cognitive functioning.
“Often we use that to show the daughter or spouse or other family member there that it’s obvious your grandpa doesn’t know the year that he’s in and doesn’t know what you do with the the car keys in his hand,” Kuhlman said. “They are not designed to screen for subtle signs of dementia or cognitive decline.”
The New Right comes to define Trump and the Republican Party
The good news for Trump, who, at 78, has already exceeded the life expectancy of the average U.S. male, is that presidents tend to be much healthier than the general population.
“You can’t be elected president without believing in yourself,” Shirley said. “That doesn’t make presidents Superman, but it does help them physically. Trump is a very healthy man who does as he pleases, walks as he pleases, and behaves as he pleases.”
