Last month, Donald Trump
boasted about his “perfect” MRI scan, which his aides dismissed as a
standard examination. However, a former White House physician has now
questioned that assessment.
Trump’s second medical
examination of the year was a “scheduled follow-up” that included
“advanced imaging,” according to White House physician Sean
Barbabella. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary for the White House, later
stated that she was unaware of the imaging that occurred. A few days later,
Trump disclosed that he had an MRI while seeing Walter Reed, describing the
procedure as “perfect.”
However, former President
Barack Obama’s White House doctor, Jeffrey Kuhlman, questioned why the
79-year-old president spent more than three hours at Walter Reed when the
evaluation aside from the MRI should have taken less than fifteen minutes.
“It’s about an eight-minute
helicopter ride from the South Lawn to Walter Reed. So we know that he at least
had four hours available to undergo medical care,” Kuhlman told The Hill. “There’s
a disconnect there.”
Kuhlman went on to say that
it was common to have scans at Walter
Reed. “Most any procedure scope, I had the capabilities there at the White
House. The only thing I couldn’t, that I’d have to Walter Reed for, is advanced
imaging,” he told the outlet.
According to Barbabella,
Trump is in “excellent overall health” and is the oldest person to be
elected president of the United States.
Trump referred to the
medical checkup as a “semiannual physical” prior to his arrival at the military
medical hospital. The president didn’t disclose additional information
regarding the medical examination until his most recent trip to Asia.
Trump informed reporters
about cognitive tests he “decided to take” at Walter Reed in addition
to the MRI.
The president bashed
Democratic Reps. Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as being “low
IQ” before challenging them to take the same cognitive tests.
“Those are really hard,
they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way. But they’re cognitive
tests,” Trump said aboard Air Force One.
“The first couple of
questions are easy. A tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up
to about five or six, and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they
couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions,” Trump added.
Ocasio-Cortez replied to a
clip of Trump’s remarks, suggesting he took a dementia test. “Out of
curiosity, did those doctors ask you to draw a clock by any chance? Was that
part hard for you, too? Asking for 340 million people,” she wrote on X
The Montreal Cognitive
Assessment, “a commonly used test to detect mild cognitive decline and
early signs of dementia,” was performed on Trump during his most recent
health exam in April, according to VeryWell Health. At the time, Barbabella
wrote, “The president had a perfect score.”
In his memo from October,
the White House doctor made no mention of the test.
According to a June
Axios/Ipsos American Health Index, 74% of Americans believe that any current
president should be required by law to disclose their medical records, as
lawmakers doubt Trump’s mental health.
What did the former White House doctor specifically say about the
MRI?
The former White House doctor, Jeffrey Kuhlman, raised specific
enterprises about the timeline and translucency of Donald Trump’s MRI checkup.
He noted that utmost medical procedures could have been handled within the
White House except for advanced imaging like an MRI, which needed a trip to
Walter Reed.
Kuhlman stressed that Trump had several unaccounted hours during
the visit, suggesting that further medical evaluations may have passed than
intimately bared.
This raises questions about the full compass of Trump’s health
issues and the absoluteness of information handed to the public. The doctor
stressed that while chairpersons have historically been uncommunicative about
their health, there’s a conflict between particular sequestration and the
public’s right to know about a leader’s medical condition.
