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.