President Donald Trump has been on the world stage for more than a decade now, during which he has given his fair share of rambling speeches — although he claims it’s a “brilliant” way of speaking. But is the rambling getting worse?
Since Trump returned to office a year ago, the internet has gone back and forth on whether the 45th and 47th president is healthy. The rambling paired with a mysterious bruise on his hand and swollen ankles has people wondering: Is Trump okay?
New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently wrote about Trump’s health, told Today, Explained co-host Astead Herndon that the answer was quite complicated.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What was the catalyst for this piece?
We’ve all been watching him for years now, but especially in the last year, there’s been more questions about him: his health, the bruising on his hands, the swollen cankles, the falling asleep in meetings.
Before sitting down with him, I’d been reading some books by members of his family. I talked to his niece, Mary Trump. Mary Trump says sometimes when she looks at Donald Trump speaking in the public square, she sees flashes of her grandfather when he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know if he has it or not, but I wanted to ask him about it.
He started saying, “My father was so healthy; he had no problems. His heart couldn’t be stopped.” “He did have one problem though,” Trump told me. And he said, “Late in life, he had, what’s the word for it?” And he pointed to his head. And Caroline Levitt, the press secretary sitting next to me, she kind of rescued him in that moment and said, “Alzheimer’s.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, he had an Alzheimer’s thing. Well, well, I don’t have it.”
What are the concerns with Trump’s health that you uncovered?
The story I set out to write about was to figure out whether he is healthy or not, and it kind of ended up being a story about whether the government is healthy or not. There’s kind of an infection that has spread throughout Trump’s inner circle where everybody who talks about him talks about him in the craziest, most North Korean-type, dear-leader way.
Instead of just saying he’s healthy for an almost 80-year-old, that he’s slowing down a little bit, but he’s certainly healthy enough to be president, people talk about him in these terms that are just completely outrageous: superhuman, the healthiest man alive. He told me he was healthier than he was 40 years ago.
The guy doesn’t exercise; he doesn’t eat well. He drinks enough Diet Coke to fill a football stadium. And you just can’t quite trust the people around him. And I felt like the story I published said a lot about Trump’s America, not just Trump’s health.
I want to ask about the bruised hand. Did you get any answers on what that is coming from or the level of severity?
When I got to the Oval Office for my interview, we shook hands. He had a really soft, warm hand, which was surprising, but on the back it was very dry. [He had] a big kind of rhino hide — like bruise on the back. I asked him about it, and what he claims is that he’s on an aspirin regimen, on a much higher dose than even his doctors want him to be on. He says he’s on aspirin because he wants thin blood. And because he takes so much aspirin, he bruises very easily.
The doctors confirmed this is what’s going on. He says, because he bruises easily and because he shakes just a ton of hands, he’s always bruising.
I’m curious about some of the logistics and how open they were to this discussion of his health.
I went into the White House early in my process and I was transparent about what I wanted to write about. I said, look, there’s a big question about the president’s health. Lots of people think they have the answer. I want to clarify the picture, and there’s not a lot of people who really know the answer. There’s Donald Trump; there’s his inner circle; there’s his doctors — and they made a lot of people available.
It was not clear I was going to get to talk to Donald Trump, but before I talked to him, they made time for me to go to the White House and sit down with Marco Rubio. He’s got 40 jobs, and he took time out of his busy day to sit with me in Caroline Levitt’s office and talk to me about how the president was, quote, “too healthy.”
He was telling these stories [that were so embarrassing] that he was debasing himself in a way. “When I ride on Air Force One, I need to take a nap, and so I hide in a blanket. I wrap myself like a mummy covering my head and I do that because I know that at some point on the flight, [Trump’s] going to emerge from the cabin and start prowling the hallways to see who is awake. I want him to think it’s a staffer who fell asleep. I don’t want him to see his secretary of state sleeping on a couch and think, Oh, this guy is weak.”
What did his doctors tell you about his health?
When I showed up to the Oval Office, they were holding pieces of paper that said “Talking Points” on the top of it. So they had things they wanted to get through. They told me that he was as healthy as he says he is. One of them said that they did an EKG of his heart, and he appears to be a 64-year-old or a 65-year-old, according to the AI data that they found. At the end of my interview, Caroline Levitt turns to one of the doctors and says, “oh, you worked for the Obamas, didn’t you?” So I asked the doctor, well, who’s healthier? President Obama? Or President Trump? And Trump is sitting right there staring across the desk at the doctors making direct eye contact. And without any hesitation, the doctor says, “Oh, President Trump.”
Did you experience any skittishness when it came to reporting on Trump?
I think the fact that we went through the Biden era has made reporting on this topic easier in a way. It’s still difficult because you can’t get to the bottom of it, but it made people more willing to talk, maybe?
[The Biden era] made journalists more willing to go for these stories [and] for editors to assign them, because we went through this period of time with Biden where he aged in front of all of our eyes and people were too skittish in some ways to write about it.
Does that comparison feel fair?
I think it’s definitely fair to draw some comparisons if for no other reason than they’re both old. Donald Trump is about to be 80 years old. Just by dint of that fact, it’s a worthwhile story to cover.
One reason I think that Trump is able to “get away” with some things that could be signs of aging is that they could also just be signs of Donald Trump being Donald Trump. He has been a chaotic figure for a long time. He’s got this rambling way of talking. He says unhinged, outrageous stuff. He did that 15 years ago. He does that now. Are there differences in the way that he communicates between now and then? Sure, of course. But it’s not as stark as if and when Biden starts to show signs of deteriorating. Because Biden was such a serious guy who kind of spoke in your traditional politician way, as soon as there was slippage, you could notice it a lot easier.
I want to ask about something that does seem similar: The president and their aides basically kept telling you not to believe your own eyes. In this instance, you have Trump dozing off in meetings and aides saying, oh, that was just his thinking pose.
One thing that did not make it into the story — I’ll talk about it with you for the first time. This is a little exclusive.
I did talk to some people from Biden’s White House for this story. They didn’t want to put their name out there, obviously, but one person was telling me that watching this happen did kind of feel similar to them. I have a quote [about Biden’s health issues] in front of me here I can read, which is: “I think there’s a world where we denied it so much that there was a delta between what people were seeing and hearing, and that led to distrust. I think that denial of the thing people are seeing — you just can’t get away with that anymore. I think they’re making the same kind of mistake in backing themselves into the same kind of corner that we were in.”
Part of Trump’s broader success and appeal is that he can get his followers to believe his own version of reality. Do you think this strategy on this issue of his health is actually working for him?
I think it’s like a lot of issues for Trump these days: He’s got a base of support that’s going to believe everything, and then there’s this group between his supporters and his detractors who are going to be less convinced by this.
Donald Trump does seem to be losing his ability to control his story. His poll numbers are not what he wants them to be. The midterms are trending in the wrong direction. The immigration story is not even going the way he wants to go, and that was kind of a top issue for him.
The way that he tries to control the narrative, so to speak, of his health is sort of akin to how he’s trying to control everything, and I just feel like he’s sort of losing some of that control. This happens to presidents; this is why they become lame ducks. It’s just happening a little earlier for Trump than is traditional for a president. He’s been referred to as a lame duck by pundits already, and that doesn’t normally happen until the third year of a presidency.