Bulwark Takes - The Oldest President in History Is Acting His Age

Episode Date: January 3, 2026

Sam Stein and Sonny Bunch take on new reporting on Donald Trump’s health—from repeated cognitive tests and confusing medical disclosures to visible signs of aging and a White House press operation that won’t give straight answers. Read the WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/as-signs-of-aging-emerge-trump-responds-with-defiance-769c5dcd

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwark here in 2026. My first take, glad to do it with Sunny Bunch. Hot takes. How you doing, man? You good? I'm good. Excited for the new year of takes. It's going to be great. I forget, we calculated how many takes we did in 2025 is well over like a thousand.

More than a thousand takes. I think we did more than a thousand. It wasn't all of me. It felt like. it was all in me, but it was not. So we're going to have to beat that record, I think, by 2026. For this one, we're going to be talking about Trump and his health. The reason we're talking about Trump and his health is that there's this kind of really interesting article from the Wall Street Journal that dives into his health way more extensively and comprehensively than we've had. It was so interesting and it's so provocative that Trump felt the need to actually

get on the phone with the reporters to talk about it and insist that he's the picture of great health. My favorite thing, as you mentioned, he gets on the phone with And it's, it is like the old Twitter meme bit, please don't put it in the paper that I'm mad that you're asking about my health. Because that's, that's exact. It's like, I can't believe you're asking me about my health again. I'm so healthy. I do cognitive tests once a month. All the time.

And I pass all of them. I pass all of them with flying colors. And like that, that there is like a second order question after that, which is like, why are you doing so many cognitive tests all the time? Why is this needed? I guess we'll jump ahead a little bit because, you know, we'll get back to the journal story in a little bit. But to your point, we're recording this. It's the Friday, January 2nd. This is going to come out tomorrow, though.

But this morning, he went on true social, and I couldn't tell if he was saying this was a third cognitive test he got, but I think it might have been. Because he writes this, I'm going to read from it. Why does doctors have just reported that I am in perfect health and that I aced on caps, meaning was, he had to define ace, meaning was correct on 100% of the questions asked. For the third straight time, my cognitive examination,

something which nor other president or previous vice president was willing to take. P.S. I strongly believe that anyone running for president or vice president should be mandatorily forced to take a strong, meaningful, and proven cognitive examination. Okay. So he definitely took his third cognitive test. It's a lot. Why do you need to do three? I don't know. I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to pretend. I'm not going to play a doctor on TV here. But it is interesting that he keeps doing it. And it's interesting that he keeps getting annoyed at having to talk about doing it. That is, that is again the thing that jumps out. Now, back to the Wall. journal piece. It is interesting because, look, on the one hand, Donald Trump, oldest president ever

to be sworn elected, right? He's five months older than Biden was. And, and, okay, fine, old, very old. He's five months older than when he was inaugurated. He was five months older than when Biden was inaugurated. Yeah, right. He's old. He's an old president. He is an old man. And that comes with certain things. I will say, look, he does the live question and answer session, with reporters that Biden avoided for a long time, right? That he was trying not to do. I will say he sounds basically the same as usual often in those. He's a little bit raspier this time around.

He's certainly a little bit mumbly. But he is still, at least he's doing these. I don't think he is demented precisely or anything like that. But he definitely seems to be, he seems to be slowing down a step. And he seems to be, as was highlighted in this piece, falling asleep a lot. My favorite little tidbit from the piece was like, we've told the president he has to keep his eyes open, which is a hilarious thing to have to say to the president. Like, when you're in a public setting, sir, please keep your eyes open

because it looks like you're sleeping. And everybody talks about how you're a tired old man. That to me read like they were trying to like create an explanation that would satisfy Trump. Like he's clearly falling asleep. He says, oh, no, I just like resting my eyes as if there's a distinction. And so then the white house says to say, no, we've instructed him to stop resting his eyes as if they can stop him from sleeping. Now, there was some interesting news in the journal article in all seriousness. So a couple things. One is the bruising on his hands that everyone has been focusing on because he's covering it up with makeup. It's on both hands now. His skin is so brittle that it can get cut just by nicking, for instance, in this case, Pam Bondi, knicked it with her ring and it

cut his hand right before the Republican National Convention speech. Now, an explanation for that is that, and again, this is in the journal article, Trump's on a fairly heavy dose of aspirin, more than is usually prescribed. It's not like extraordinary, but it's on the high end. And his explanation is that he just likes thin blood. He likes thin blood. So he says they say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood. I don't want thick blood pouring through my heart, Trump said. I want nice thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense? Question mark. And Sunday, I know you're not playing doctor, but does that make sense? Sure. I also don't want, I also don't want thick gravy blood pouring through my heart, I guess. I don't know. I don't want it clogging everything up.

No, it definitely, it's one of these things where he says the doctors told him to stop doing it and he's superstitious. He doesn't want to change what he's doing because he's superstitious. And look, I understand that. There are other little interesting tidbits here. Like the doctor said he needs to wear compression socks. And he was wearing compression socks for a while to help the circulation in his feet, right? And he didn't like doing that either. So he stopped. This is one of these things where it's like it's one thing if it's your dad right it's your dad who's just at home he's an 80 year old man he's like i don't want to do these things a doctor says and you're like all right man you've had a good run he's not your dad though he's the president of the united states he needs to be healthy he needs

to be not incapacitated by a freak you know uh thick thick blood situation in his heart i know it's a good point no it's a really good point it's like is there an obligation that the president faces or is burdened with to act in a healthy lifestyle, right? Like, he is our president, but we can't, like, say, hey, stop eating junk food, right? I mean, or can we, right? I will say, for someone who loves thin blood, his diet is atrocious. And this was buried at the end of the piece. But, I mean, it's pretty well known.

And I'll tell a funny story when I'm done with this. But in a podcast interview in October, Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Grudor is described being shocked by Trump's eating habits when they travel together during the campaign. This is a direct quote. While flying to a campaign event, according to Gruters, Trump consumed French fries, a McDonald's quarter pounder hamburger, a Big Mac and a fish filet. Trump said he had plenty of energy, which he credited to his parents or he said were energetic in their old age. The diet that this man has is awful. Like, awful. The story I want to tell is that when I was back at The Daily Beast, I'm not going to name names, but there was a reporter who I told to, because it's been known that he eats this shitty diet. I told a reporter. or two, just eat like Trump for a week and write about your experience. And there was a whole, we got so far done the runway, we had like a whole diet, like a meal plan laid out. Like in the morning, it would be eggs and bacon, no coffee, just Diet Coke.

And for lunch, it'll be Big Macs, McDonald's, Fish Filet, snacks would be chips and, you know, cookies, which he eats. Dinner would be just an overdone steak and a lot of fries. Like this was, and chocolate cake. And this would be seven days of this. And the reporter was like, okay, I can do this. I can do this. But then the prep work, this reporter emailed a nutritionist from Columbia University and laid out the diet plan that we had for him and the meal plan. And the

literally was the response from the professor was, do you have heart health problems in your family history? And the reporter completely freaked out and backed out of the story, which is a long way of saying, this is not great eating by any stretch of imagination. First of all, Sam, first of all, yes who are we going to do this to here at the bulwark because we don't have any of these we're not we're not letting anybody off the hook with this we're we're getting i told jared he had to do it he hasn't done it yet we're getting jared or we're getting tim maybe we can get tim to do it live on on youtube um no uh so i i i look here's the thing that's not a lot of mcdonald's if you're in a mcdonald's food eating competition that's like if you're going to like if somebody comes to you with a big plate of food like how fast can you eat this. I'd be like, well, that, you know, I worked at McDonald's for three years as a kid in my teenage years. I could eat that in a lunch break. You know, that's whatever. You wouldn't feel great afterwards, but you could do it. I wouldn't feel, well, I have 15, you know, you can eat anything then. If I tried to do that now, I would feel, I would feel awful for a week. I would feel,

I would feel like death. You know, so again, if the context matters here, like in a, in an eating competition, not a lot of McDonald's. For a regular 80-year-old man having lunch all the time, lot of McDonald's. That's a lot. And I honestly, I, I mean, look, you know, everybody is different. Everybody's metabolisms are different. His body has clearly adapted to this lifestyle in some way, like a Chernobyl accident victim absorbing radiation and processing it. But like, I, I don't understand how he does it and does not collapse of, of just like, just sluggishness and feel, like, I would just feel, like, I would just feel, weighted down and gross all the time if that was how he gets no sleep and the other thing that is in this piece is how little exercise he gets he plays golf but he's on the cart all the time and he's got this belief that the life provides you a limited number of steps and he doesn't

want to waste the steps so he doesn't jog or walk or anything like that so you know that I forgot about that from his first term where he believes he has like a finite amount of energy and that like the more exercise you do it depletes the energy like it's like it's a life bar in a video game Like, it's, it's just steadily shrinking down. No, he has interesting theories about health, which again, like, that goes to the whole blood thinning and thickening thing. The one thing that I found very interesting in the story, and I wasn't quite sure how to parse, was the bit where they're talking about his sleep habits. They're talking about his sleep habits on Air Force One and how the folks he flies with kind of trade out. They trade at sometimes, you know, they have to like, they have to sub in because people are like falling asleep around him.

Does he not sleep on airplanes? Is that just the thing? Is he, is he awake all night? Like, what's the deal? So my understanding, and this is, I kind of called this from when I was editing Aswin Su Spangue, Sue saying, sorry Swin, and Lockland Markey, who were doing reporting on the stuff at the Beast during Trump's first time was that he just doesn't, he's just like constantly on the go. His mind's racing. He's, you know, scrolling through internet, watching Fox News. He'll doze here and there. But it became a thing on Air Force. course one, I believe, that it was almost like a source of machismo pride that you would stay up with the big guy. And people who took naps on the plane were, you know, thought less of. And so it became this type of thing where people were just killing themselves through sleep deprivation just because Trump doesn't sleep. It's not a healthy structure. Sleep's actually quite important. But it is just how he operates, right? He's always up at weird hours. He's posting at weird hours.

he watches an endless amount of cable. He catches up on cable because he TiVo's it. So he's like looking back and trying to critique the shows and the guests and all the things. And then he's on Twitter like everyone else. The other thing, and it just gets more to the serious part of how the White House is handling this is that, I mean, the real news here, I guess, is that they had been talking about this MRI for a while.

So the White House had said, well, he got an MRI and then they were kind of very vague about what it was about. And then it was like Trump was just couldn't tell you what it was for, but he had aced it. The journal reveals it wasn't an MRI. It was a CT scan, which they report is a fast form or common way to capture detailed images of the body. The MRI is a slower test that is superior for soft tissues. Trump himself told the journal it wasn't an MRI. It was less than that it was a scan. And then Navy Captain Sean Barbella, who's his doctor, confirmed a statement to the journal that Trump received a CT scan. He said, Trump's doctor initially, told him they would perform either an MRI or CT scan, and they ultimately decided to do

the latter. Barbella said CT scan was done, quote, to definitively rule out any cardiovascular issues. There's a couple things here. One is why not just say that from the get-go, right? Like, that doesn't quite make sense to me if it was, I don't know, not a big deal. And the other thing is, and this was pointed out by a guy, Jonathan Rayner, who's a doctor, prolific on Twitter. Back in 2018, Dr. Ronnie Jackson, now congressman, who was Trump's doctor at the time, said a CT of the president's heart disclosed elevated coronary calcium score, suggesting coronary atherosclerosis. So in 2018, they did acknowledge a little bit of an issue, which is common, like high cholesterol, that type of stuff. But now in this journal article, they're insisting that CT scans showed nothing

at all. And this gets to my question for you, which is like how you handle this as a White House press shop is obviously a big deal because we just lived through an administration that handled it incredibly poorly. It's interesting. I, the thing of it is we can't believe anything that they say. First of all, I mean, like for for for weeks, we were thinking, all right, MRI, MRI. Nope, turns out it was CAT scan. Different. Different. Now, whether or not that difference matters kind of depends on what it shows, they say it doesn't show anything. I don't know if I believe that. I don't, I don't have any reason to believe it, but I don't have any reason to disbelieve it either, aside from our general level of disbelief of anything that comes out

of the shop. I mean, look, again, this is one of these things where, like, in a normal functioning White House, you like to have this idea of full transparency, that we know, we know everything they know. And there has been nothing in this administration or the previous iteration of this administration that thinks that we, that leads me to believe that we have all of the information that we need here. I mean, it would be great if we did. If we don't, maybe he just drops dead one day. And, and that's what happens. I don't think that's what's going to happen. He seems, again, he seems, this is the thing. This is the, this is like their Trump card is like, look, he's out there. He's doing, he's doing the press conferences. He's out there. He's doing

these things 24 hours a day. He's constantly on the move. He's, he's doing the events. He's meeting with people. You know, yes, he closes his eyes in the meeting sometimes, but like, he's still out there. He's doing things. He's very active. He's very with it. He's, he's not sundowning or whatever. And like, oh, okay, fine. I, like, again, we see. it. We just see it with our eyes. Let me ask you a hypothetical because we can work at this at another angle. Let's say, you know, something crazy happens in this White House just decides to be totally transparent about this stuff. And let's say, and I'm not saying this has happened, but let's

say they just came out with like, look, he's got elevated cholesterol. He's on a lipid. He's getting older. So we're carving out a little bit more time for him to have some downtime. But he's working more than normal hours. He's cognitively with it. He's got some blood issues because of all the, you know, swelling in his ankles. We're monitoring that. There are signs of aging, but everyone ages. Like, obviously they don't want to say that because there's a necessity to project this man as just like, you know, Hercules or whatever.

Sure. But would it be like that biggest deal if they acknowledged some, you know, problems here there are little issues that everyone encounters with aging? I don't think that, I mean, no, I know, it certainly wouldn't hurt him with his base certainly and frankly like i don't even think it would be that big of a deal i don't i honestly don't like because there is no he's on too many medications he can't be president clause in the constitution right like it doesn't actually change anything being transparent about this stuff does not actually change anything about what he can do and what he can and how long he can serve

and you know any any of that stuff like it doesn't it doesn't matter it doesn't actually matter at all except i think in his own head which brings me back to like Like his annoyance at having to address this regularly. It really is like that's the thing that bothers him the most about any of these questions. He seems vexed by having to discuss it. Yeah. And on top of that, I think, you know, clouding all this is what happened with Biden. Right.

It's like you make so much of, you know, that was just this man is infirm. He's not capable for the job. He's so slow. He's so old. And you have to now avoid the perception that you two are in the same physical and position so all right man well if you want to do the uh trump diet challenge just let me know um we can sign you up let me talk to my doctors first all right sunny bunch thank you so much buddy talk to you soon everyone thanks for listening to this bulwark take