Dem
47
GOP
53
Back in October, as readers will recall, Donald Trump headed over to Walter Reed Medical Center for an annual physical—his second one in a 6-month period. It's certainly possible that the White House is calculating "annual" using the same math that says the tariffs are working, the price of milk is going down, health insurance is still affordable, and Trump is the most popular president since Abraham Lincoln. Or, it's possible the administration has something to hide.
Inasmuch as the second theory is the much better bet, there has been enormous pressure on Trump to release more information about the procedures he underwent. The White House press pool has clearly learned that if you nag the President enough, he will sometimes pop off in a fit of pique, and give you exactly what you want. So it was here; they kept asking him about his MRI, and he finally said, in effect "You want to know about the MRI? Fine. I don't care."
Consequently, White House Physician Sean Barbabella released a letter yesterday in which he explained that Trump underwent a "preventative" MRI of his heart and abdomen, that the results were normal, and that this is standard for an "executive physical." In other words: "Nothing to see here. Move along."
Nobody seriously believes this is the full story. Even The New York Post, which tends to be pretty Trump-sympathetic, put "preventative" in quotes in its headline, which is the written equivalent of an eye-roll. The thing is, "preventative" MRIs, particularly for heart issues, aren't really a thing. We went looking for backup for that assertion since, after all, we are not physicians, and the first two preventative-MRI-skeptical articles we found were from a research group at Michigan and a research group at Ohio State. If people from THOSE two schools are in agreement on something, you can pretty much take that something to the bank.
Or, if you would like another perspective, Dr. Jonathan Reiner was Dick Cheney's cardiologist for 30 years. That means he must be pretty good, since Cheney's ticker was a ticking time bomb for half a century. It also suggests the doctor is not in the bag for the Democrats. Anyhow, he was interviewed yesterday, and he said Barbabella's letter doesn't pass the smell test. The Doctor's exact words: "There really is no preventative cardiac MRI. This is not a standard test for an 80-year-old man to undergo advanced imaging."
Reiner believes that there must have been some precipitating factor that led to those specific tests being ordered, and he says the White House should just be honest about what it was. Of course, this White House really doesn't do "honest," so don't expect the administration to follow Reiner's advice anytime soon. The real question is whether Team Trump is: (1) hiding something fairly mild/commonplace (say, a slight heart murmur) because of Trump's ego and because he doesn't want there to be ANY suggestion that he's mortal, or (2) if this is a Woodrow Wilson 1919/Franklin D. Roosevelt 1944/Ronald Reagan 1988 situation, and something really serious is being covered up. We suspect the only way we could possibly learn the answer to that question before January 20, 2029, is if Trump succumbs to whatever it is that has him toddling over to Walter Reed for surprise MRIs. (Z)