Age and health concerns about Donald Trump

At 78 years, 9 months and 23 days old, Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, is the oldest person in American history to be inaugurated as president for the second time. He previously became the oldest major-party presidential nominee five weeks after his 78th birthday.
Since the early days of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, his physical and mental health have been debated. Trump was 70 years old when he first took office, surpassing Ronald Reagan as the oldest person to assume the presidency. Trump's age, weight, lifestyle, and history of heart disease raised questions about his physical health. Some psychiatrists and reporters have speculated that Trump may have mental health impairments, such as dementia (which runs in his family) or narcissistic personality disorder. Such claims have prompted discussion about ethics and applicability of the Goldwater rule, which prohibits mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures without direct examination. Public opinion polling from July 2024 indicated an increase in the percentage of Americans concerned about his fitness for a second term.
Trump has been criticized for secrecy and lack of transparency in regard to his medical records and health. As of October 12, 2024, Trump had not released his health information since 2015, despite promising in August 2024 to release results of a recent examination. Critics noted that his opponent, Kamala Harris, had released her records, and that such disclosures are a common practice among presidential candidates.
During his 2024 campaign, polls generally showed that a majority of Americans believed that Trump was too old to serve as president. A February 2024 Ipsos poll finding that Joe Biden's age and health were major or moderate concerns for 86% of voters also found that 59% similarly thought Trump was too old to hold the office.
A July 2024 poll, taken shortly after the first presidential debate, found that 60% of voters saw Trump as too old for a second term. This represented a steady and constant increase in voters polled by this pollster sharing this concern, and paralleled the progression of the larger number of voters who had the same concern about Biden. An August 2024 Morning Consult poll found that the number of respondents who thought Trump was too old to run jumped by seven percent, to 51%, from their previous poll once Trump's opponent changed from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, and the number of respondents who thought Trump was in good health correspondingly fell by six percent. The poll further reported that nearly 80% of respondents "were unsure he'd be up for serving a full second term". A Marquette University poll released the same day reported that 57% of respondents felt that Trump was too old.
Since Trump first ran for president, his mental health and fitness has been a topic of public discussion.
In 2017, psychologist John Gartner collected more than 41,000 signatures of mental health professionals on a petition, directed to then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The petition asserted that Trump suffered from a serious mental illness and was "psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties" of the presidency. Gartner asserted that Trump's mental handicaps are a mix of narcissism, paranoia, sociopathy, and sadism.
As early as November 2015, Vanity Fair reported the opinion of a number of mental health experts that Trump had narcissistic personality disorder. In December 2015, Trump's personal physician, Harold Bornstein, wrote a letter about Trump's health. The letter did not address Trump's mental health, but it did state that Trump would be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency". Bornstein disclosed in 2018 that Trump had dictated this letter over the telephone. He said, "Mr. Trump dictated the letter and I would tell him what he couldn't put in there." In August 2016, Bornstein stated that Trump's "health is excellent, especially his mental health".
In 2016 and 2017, a number of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists faced criticism for violating the Goldwater rule, as they claimed that Donald Trump displayed "an assortment of personality problems, including grandiosity, a lack of empathy, and 'malignant narcissism'", and that he has a "dangerous mental illness", despite having never examined him.
In February 2017, psychiatrist Allen Frances wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times regarding Trump and narcissistic personality disorder, "I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn't meet them." According to the American Psychiatric Association, "saying that a person does not have an illness is also a professional opinion."
In April 2017, forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee hosted a meeting at Yale University medical school regarding the ethics of discussing Trump's mental health. In October 2017, Lee published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, containing essays from 27 psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals on the "clear and present danger" that Trump's mental health poses to the "nation and individual well being". They argued that the president's issues affected the mental health of the United States population, and that he placed the country at grave risk of war because of his pathological traits. They asserted that Trump exhibited narcissistic personality disorder, 'extreme present hedonism' and bullying. Carlos Lozada, writing for The Washington Post, considered these conclusions "compelling", but also noted that the book contributors were writing from their own political perspectives and that other mental health professionals held differing views. Lee and others contended that Trump's presidency represented an emergency allowing, or even requiring, psychiatrists to make an exception to the APA's Goldwater rule, which holds that it is unethical for members of the APA to give professional opinions about public figures without having examined them in person and without having obtained their consent. Proponents of such an exception have asserted that there is precedent in allowing psychiatrists to speak out when someone presents a clear and present danger.
Also in September 2017, journalist Bill Moyers interviewed psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and said that Trump "makes increasingly bizarre statements that are contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the contrary". Lifton replied, "He doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion." As an example, Lifton said, when Trump claimed that former president Barack Obama was born in Kenya, "he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part."
In 2019, amid continued speculation, the American Psychiatric Association and Alzheimer's Society requested that professionals other than Trump's doctors adhere to the Goldwater Rule and refrain from giving armchair diagnoses of Trump. A growing number of individuals in academia have continued to call for a relaxation of the Goldwater rule.
Clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump, who is Trump's niece, published a book in 2020 identifying the disorders she believed him to have.
An academic consensus across multiple studies has characterized Trump as having "very high extraversion, very low agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and sky-high narcissism".
Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College Dublin said in The Conversation in July 2024 that "the potential effect of the attempted assassination of Trump upon Trump's mental health – whether negligible, negative or positive – cannot be ignored", and that Trump being an extrovert might improve his ability to deal with the psychological impact of the event, while "other personality traits, including low agreeableness, low conscientiousness and low emotional stability, also attributed to Trump, are associated with greater levels of PTSD", as are "high levels of narcissism", which can also "cause people to react to even limited threats with aggression". In August 2024, Vanity Fair reported that Trump was in fact "experiencing trauma from his near-death experience", with a campaign insider reportedly claiming that Trump was "watching that seven-second clip of how close he was to getting shot right in the head – over and over and over again", saying that Trump "may actually legit have PTSD".
The "Duty to Warn" movement was founded by medical professionals concerned about Trump's cognitive health in his first year in office.
In September 2017, psychiatrist Jeffrey A. Lieberman published an article extensively speculating on diagnoses for Donald Trump despite claiming to adhere to the Goldwater rule in the beginning paragraph. He arrived at a diagnosis of "incipient dementia" but faced no sanctions.
In response to speculation about his cognitive abilities, Trump voluntarily took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) as part of his January 2018 health checkup. He reported receiving a score of 30/30, indicating a normal level of cognitive function, although the results have not been released. Critics have contended that the MoCA test is too basic to diagnose the problems asserted. Trump used the phrase "Person, woman, man, camera, TV" several times during a July 2020 Fox News interview with Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at New York University, while describing part of the 2018 MoCA test and praising his own performance on it. Trump has not publicly revealed the results of any subsequent cognitive tests but, as late as 2024, continued to praise his performance in the 2018 cognitive test. Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, noted that 2018 results would be too outdated to be relevant in 2024.
The shift in Trump's speeches by 2024 towards shorter sentences, more tangents, more repetition, more all-or-nothing thinking and more confusion of words and phrases could indicate cognitive decline. Basil Smikle of Columbia University argued in January 2024 that one reason Trump has not seen as much of the age criticism as Biden is that his rallies seem loud and vibrant, whereas Biden has a more old-school approach to politics.
In 2024, medical experts told the Washington Post that Trump likely has an elevated genetic risk of dementia. Nephew Fred Trump III sees signs of the dementia that he saw in Trump's father, Fred Trump Sr. Fred Trump Sr. was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in October 1991, at the age of 86, eight years before he died.
Coverage of Trump's mental acuity has generated discussion of whether the media has been 'sanewashing' Trump by selecting more coherent clips or quotes from his speeches that give a false impression of mental acuity without balancing that coverage by also focusing on the parts of his speeches that might raise concerns about his mental fitness to be President.
The New York Times published an analysis of Trump's speeches on October 6, 2024, writing, "with the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president's speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years." The paper commented that Trump has lately seemed "confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality". It highlighted an average rally length of 82 minutes compared with 45 minutes in 2016, and a 69% increase in the use of obscenities. It cited that experts considered this increase in tangential speech and behavioral disinhibition potential results of advancing age and cognitive decline.
During the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, presidential candidate and primary opponent Jeb Bush speculated in February 2016 that Trump had mental health issues, stating, "I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but the guy needs therapy."
On April 14, 2017, Representatives Jamie Raskin and Earl Blumenauer introduced the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act. The bill, if passed, would have allowed Congress, by a concurrent resolution, to require an 11-member commission to conduct an examination of the president and report the findings.
In September 2017, Jeanne Suk Gerson wrote in The New Yorker, "A strange consensus does appear to be forming around Trump's mental state", including Democrats and Republicans who doubt Trump's fitness for office.
In January 2018, after North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un and Trump publicly exchanged claims about their respective "nuclear buttons", Richard Painter, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, deemed Trump "psychologically unfit" and supported transferring his powers to Vice President Pence under the 25th Amendment. In April 2018, Vanity Fair reported that Trump's advisers "worry about his mental health" when he is outside the controls available in the White House environment.
In 2018, Trump dismissed then-prevalent questions regarding his mental health, stating that he is a "very stable genius". As evidence of his mental capacities, he pointed to his business success, his victory over Republican competitors, and his election to the presidency against Hillary Clinton. Trump has also pushed back on claims he couldn't remember the name of a fallen soldier while talking to the widow by stating he has "one of the great memories of all time".
In December 2015, Trump's personal physician, Harold Bornstein, released a letter of health praising Trump for "extraordinary physical strength and stamina". The letter asserted that Trump would be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency" and said that a recent medical exam yielded "only positive results". Before Bornstein's death in 2021, he told CNN that Trump had dictated the entire letter. The language used was in Trump's style and not that typical of a medical doctor; in particular, the American journalist Kurt Eichenwald noted that positive test results often do not mean a positive (favorable) outcome for the patient. A follow-up medical report by Bornstein claimed Trump's blood pressure, liver and thyroid functions to be in normal ranges, and that he takes a statin. At 6 feet 3 inches (1.90 m) and 236 pounds (107 kg), Trump's body mass index of 29.5 registered as overweight which is on the higher end of overweight BMIs.
In January 2018, Trump was examined by White House physician Ronny Jackson, who stated that he was in excellent health, although his weight and cholesterol level were higher than recommended, and that his cardiac assessment revealed no medical issues. Several independent cardiologists commented that Trump's weight, lifestyle and LDL cholesterol ought to have raised serious concerns about his cardiac health. Trump's 2018 coronary CT calcium scan score indicates he has a form of heart disease called coronary artery disease, which is common for white males at his age.
As of 2018, Trump does not drink alcohol; this decision arose in part from watching his older brother Fred Jr. suffer from alcoholism that contributed to his early death in 1981. He also said that he has never smoked cigarettes or consumed drugs, including marijuana.
In February 2019, Trump was examined by White House physician Sean Conley. Conley stated Trump was in "very good health overall", although Trump was now slightly clinically obese, at 243 pounds (110 kg) with a BMI of 30.4.
In 2022, MSNBC described Trump as "notoriously secretive about sharing his health records with the public" and "deliberately misleading and even dishonest about his health".
In January 2024, Dr. Jay Olshansky gave Donald Trump less than a 75% chance of living through a second term based on publicly available information about his health.
On October 6, 2024, The New York Times reported that Trump had maintained a far less active campaign schedule in 2024 than he did in 2016; the report added that Trump had held only 61 rallies to that point in 2024 compared with 283 through all of 2016.
As of October 12, 2024, Trump had declined to release health information going back to 2015 when he first started running for president, despite a promise he made in August 2024 to release records from a recent examination. Releasing detailed medical reports is typical of presidential candidates. Kamala Harris released her detailed medical report on October 12, 2024.
On September 26, 2020, an event was held in the White House Rose Garden announcing Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. According to a 2021 book by Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, hours after the ceremony, Trump tested positive for COVID-19, although a subsequent test returned negative. Meadows recalled that Trump looked "a little tired" and was suspected of having a "slight cold".
Trump later traveled in Air Force One to a rally at the Harrisburg International Airport in Pennsylvania, which was attended by thousands. After Trump's diagnosis was made public, Pennsylvania health officials advised attendees to participate in the state's contact tracing program.
After returning from Bedminster, Trump received a positive test result on a rapid test and was waiting to get results of a PCR test when he did a live phone interview on Hannity. On October 2, 2020, Trump tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19, part of a White House outbreak. Later that day, Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, reportedly due to fever and labored breathing. He was treated with antiviral and an experimental antibody drug (REGN-COV2) and a steroid. He returned to the White House on October 5, still infectious and unwell. In 2021, it was revealed that his condition had been far more serious than he had previously indicated; he had dangerously low blood oxygen levels, a high fever, and lung infiltrates, indicating a severe case of COVID-19.
On July 13, 2024, Trump survived an assassination attempt while addressing a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was shot at by Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who fired eight rounds with an AR-15–style rifle from the roof of a building located approximately 400 feet (120 meters) from the stage.
According to the FBI, Trump was hit by a bullet or shrapnel, and injured in his upper right ear. He raised a hand to his ear before dropping down on his podium behind the lectern for cover. Secret Service agents lunged toward Trump and shielded him. After the assailant was declared "down", agents helped Trump get up. Blood was visible on his ear and face. He asked the Secret Service agents to let him get his shoes. According to Trump, the agents "hit me so hard that my shoes fell off, and my shoes are tight". None of the medical records, as of October 12, 2024, from the wounds have been released.