WH Makes Trump Doctor Visit Announcement – Americans Cross Fingers

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2021

The tumult the Trump administration has wrought across the United States has overshadowed some of the more mundane aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency — but they’re still kicking. This week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that Trump would soon undergo a customary physical exam, although she did not specify a date on which that would happen.

She told reporters:

‘The president will, as always, undergo a yearly physical exam. We’ll keep you posted on the date and time when that happens.’

She offered that commentary at her first press briefing in more than a month. Since Trump’s last physical exam as president, the doctor responsible for the oversight left and was replaced. Dr. Sean Conley took over after previous Physician to the President Dr. Ronny Jackson resigned in the face of scrutiny of his behavior on the job. He’d served under President Barack Obama for years before Trump, but was alleged to have engaged in excessive drinking and even distributed pills outside of official channels.

In June 2018, after Jackson was already both off the job and withdrawn from consideration to be the next Secretary of Veterans Affairs, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General confirmed that they’d opened an investigation into the allegations against him, although they did not specify whether that investigation was administrative or criminal in nature. Although Trump sought to downplay the allegations as simply the work of disgruntled Democrats like Montana’s U.S. Senator Jon Tester, the vice president’s own doctor reportedly was among those to raise concerns about Jackson. According to CNN, after a particularly potent episode in which Jackson improperly shared information about Karen Pence’s health and then blew up over being confronted about the breach, the doctor alerted then-White House chief of staff John Kelly. It took months for that concern to actually compound into anything substantive, however, seemingly having been pushed down behind the scenes.

Jackson’s exam of President Trump has itself been called into question, with some wondering whether he tweaked the president’s actual weight to keep him just out of the “obese” category. At the time — perhaps lending to the idea that he bent the truth — Jackson showered effusive praise on the president reminiscent of the nutty letter from his private physician Dr. Harold Bornstein declaring him the healthiest individual to ever become president.

The letter — which turned out to have been supposedly dictated by Trump himself — included:

‘His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary. If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.’

Hopefully we’ll get somewhat more solid of an assessment of the president’s condition from Dr. Conley.

Besides the inherent issues like that Trump is the oldest person to ever take office as president, he has a demonstrated disdain for healthy living. He shuns exercise — claiming it would use up too much of his supposedly fixed energy stores — and regularly consumes large amounts of fast food.

The question of how physically fit for office that Trump is (or isn’t) is but one weighing down on his presidency heading into the next couple of years.

Featured Image via YouTube screenshot