GOP front-runner Donald Trump marked President Joe Biden\u2019s 81st birthday on Monday by releasing a letter from his physician that reported the former president is in \u201cexcellent\u201d physical and mental health. The letter posted on Trump\u2019s social media platform contained no details to support its claims \u2013 measures like weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, or the results of any test. Dr. Bruce A. Aronwald, a New Jersey physician who says he has been Trump\u2019s doctor since 2021 and most recently examined him in September, reported that Trump\u2019s \u201cphysical exams were well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional.\u201d He added that Trump\u2019s most recent lab results were \u201ceven more favourable than prior testing on some of the most significant parameters\u201d thanks to recent weight loss he credited to \u201cimproved diet and continued daily physical exercise while maintaining a rigorous schedule.\u201d<\/p>\n
The doctor concluded the 77-year-old is \u201ccurrently in excellent health\u201d and \u201cwill continue to enjoy a healthy active lifestyle for years to come.\u201d The report comes as age has emerged as a key issue of the 2024 election, which could find Trump and Biden, the country\u2019s oldest president, facing off once again. While Trump isn\u2019t all that much younger than Biden, polls consistently find that Americans view age as more of a liability for the president. An August poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 77 per cent of US adults, including 69 per cent of Democrats, viewed Biden as too old to be effective for four more years, while only 51 per cent of adults \u2013 and just 28 per cent of Republicans \u2013 said the same about Trump. Still, Trump\u2019s rivals have tried to highlight his age by pointing attention to his own recent flubs, including mixing up the city and state where he was campaigning.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe presidency is not a job for somebody that\u2019s pushing 80 years old,\u201d Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, one of Trump\u2019s rivals, said on CNN Sunday, casting himself as a man \u201cin the prime of my life.\u201d Attestations of Trump\u2019s rigour by his doctors have become a genre of their own. In late December 2015, during his first campaign for the Republican nomination, Trump\u2019s campaign released a glowing letter from the late Dr. Harold N. Bornstein that claimed Trump, a known fast food aficionado who eschewed vigorous exercise, would \u201cunequivocally\u201d be the \u201cthe healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.\u201d Bornstein later revealed that Trump had dictated the glowing assessment himself, calling it \u201cblack humour\u201d and admitting that he had written it in five minutes while a limo sent by the then-candidate waited outside his office.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just made it up as I went along,\u201d he told CNN in 2018. \u201cIt\u2019s like the movie Fargo.\u2019 It takes the truth and moves it in a different direction.\u201d While in the White House, Trump\u2019s doctors offered a more complete picture of his health following annual physicals that included numbers and test results. His physical in 2019, for instance, revealed that he was officially considered obese, while his 2018 exam revealed he had a common form of heart disease. Still, then-White House Dr. Ronny Jackson offered a glowing report during a lengthy press conference about the exam in which he extolled Trump\u2019s \u201cincredible genes\u201d \u2013 \u201cit\u2019s just the way God made him,\u201d he said \u2013 and joked that if the then-71-year-old president had eaten a healthier diet over the previous 20 years, \u201che might live to be 200 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jackson also said Trump had performed \u201cexceedingly well\u201d on a surprise cognitive screening test designed to detect early signs of memory loss and other mild cognitive impairment. Trump continues to brag about the results to this day. Aronwald did not immediately return a message left with his office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GOP front-runner Donald Trump marked President Joe Biden\u2019s 81st birthday on Monday by releasing a letter from his physician that\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":12115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[3529,3527,168,407,101,3528,3530],"class_list":["post-12114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-cognitive-functions","tag-doctors","tag-donald-trump","tag-health","tag-joe-biden","tag-old-age","tag-us-2024-presidential-elections"],"reading_time":"4 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}