Bulwark Takes - Trump Is Not Being Honest About His Health

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Sam Stein and Will Saletan give their takes on Donald Trump’s latest visit to Walter Reed, the White House’s growing secrecy around his health, and the bizarre effort by the White House to defend footage of the president appearing to fall asleep during meetings. They discuss Trump’s repeated medical checkups, his confusing answers about MRIs and CAT scans, comparisons to the Biden health debate, and why transparency matters when it comes to the president of the United States.

Wealth isn't a fixed point. It's a journey, guided by a steady hand through uncharted waters. At Canoe Financial, we are active fund managers and independent thinkers, focused on building and protecting your wealth. Chart your course. Ask your advisor about Canoe Financial. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stey. I'm managing editor at the Bork, and I'm here with my partner, in crime. Will Salton, who is fresh off of a long weekend looking tanned, ready, healthy,

refreshed. You get a lot of sleep well? I did get a lot of sleep at the end, not at the beginning. How about you, Sam? No sleep. No sleep at all. I don't sleep anymore. You are the office yonner. If there's a yawn at Sam. Yeah, mom like my dad. I can't, I can't sleep past like 5 a.m. before waking up. I try to go back to bed. And as we're talking about this stuff because this video is about sleep, health, and the physical well-being of our president, Donald J. Trump, who for the third time in 13 months today, Tuesday, which is when we're recording this, went to Walter Reed for a medical checkup. Now, slightly abnormal to go that often when you're the president because you have a doctor on premises. First and foremost, you go to Walter Reed for like major imaging and

things like that. But, you know, he put out a post today. He said, just finished my six-month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out perfectly. Thank you to the great doctors and staff, heading back to the White House President, DJT. And so there you have it. That's our video. Trump is good.

He's fine, nothing to discuss here. Will, aren't you happy to know he's in good health? Yeah, yeah. So forgive me if 10 years later, I assume anything Donald Trump says is false. What? Sam, what's that expression? My results from Walter Reed. Anybody's anxiety about my results are answered by my third visit to Walter Reed.

You're raising a few more questions, Donald, by the number of visits you're taking to the Walter Reed Medical Center. What do you, I mean, like, who knows what to make of it, right? It could be nothing. We don't know. But it could be something. We don't know. They are so non-forthcoming about this stuff. in a way that I think it's worth emphasizing.

No president in modern history has ever been this secretive around their health. I mean, none. So we're left to guess. Yeah. And in fact, I mean, so first of all, Trump's, he's accumulated over the last decade, such a reputation for lying that nobody trusts. I mean, you might have trusted some other president who, like, wasn't as big of a liar. Although I think this goes all the way back to John Kennedy in terms of.

President's always lie about their health. Let's just sit the stage. share. But yeah, sure. Yeah. And the other thing, of course, is that over the course of Trump's second term, he keeps going to these visits for Walter Reed. And every time he goes, the information we get gets smaller and smaller. Have you noticed this? Like the first time they gave us test results. And then the next time they gave us test results. And then the next time they told us which tests, but they didn't give us the results. And then they just said, then they didn't even give us that. So, so. So. So. And we're left now with, like, Kim Jong-Trump posting his, like, everything's great. I have the best results ever. And that's it. That's all we get. I long for the days.

Do you remember Dr. Harold Bornstein? Oh, the stoner. Yeah. Yeah. Trump's original doctor with the long hair and the glasses and the coat whose office was mysteriously rated. Do you remember that was such a weird storyline? But he put out a one-pageer, I believe. that it clearly was written by Trump, which was like, no one has ever been more fit to serve

in office in the history of our country and yada, yada, yada. I think actually I'm pulling up an article now, Borenstein told CNN later after this happened, quote, he dictated that whole letter, he being Trump, I didn't write that letter. I just made it up as I went along. Clearly he was covering up something. And then obviously Trump had Ronnie Jackson as a, as a. physician who is Obama's physician at one point and then became an incredible MAGA person. Look, to your point about like you're protesting too much in a way, the, uh, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the R&C research account today, rapid response 47 has been putting up a bunch of screenshots and maybe we can put up a few here while we talk of reporters who are blinking while on air, like literally blinking or looking down. And they're accused. using them of falling asleep. So like Dana Bash, Josh Dossy, Jake Tapper, Dr. Jeremy Faust. They're all just caught in screenshots blinking. And the RNC saying, oh, look at you, you fell asleep. Yeah, no, they're just trying to make, they're trying to say that somehow the images of Trump with his eyes closed don't show that he's lagging, what we say, you know, in aging health. because, you know, here we have a picture of you with your eyes closed.

Of course, the difference is the picture of you with your eyes closed last at a millisecond because that was you blinking. And the picture of me, Donald Trump, was of me literally falling asleep over time in cabinet meetings. And God knows I can't even remember all the other contexts. Anytime he's not talking, he's fallen asleep. I mean, to be fair, I'm falling asleep listening to them, you know, talk about him at the cabinet meetings. Well, hold on. Let's play.

Let's play footage of Trump, which we do have. clearly dozing off. During the earliest years of their children's lives. Second, we are cutting unnecessary red tape. Red tape that forced providers to close, limited access to care, and made it harder for working families to find the support they needed.

We're moving away from one-size-fits-all, federal mandates, and instead empowering parents to meet their child's unique needs. And then third, we're strengthening accountability to... It's just a blink, Sam. He was blinking. It's like an 18-second blank. Here's the thing. I'm not trying to defend Trump because I do think he's dozing and like whatever.

Like I occasionally doze. But if I were dozing in a meeting, this is what I would do. And so this is the case for why Trump maybe isn't dozing because I'd be doing this. I do the head bob. I always do the head bob when I doze. And Trump's head did not bob. So that's the case I would make. Not that, oh, everyone blinks. Okay. So I'll give you that. But Sam, this is a guy who's acutely conscious of being on a camera, what he looks like on camera, wants everything to be perfect. Central casting, right? He's obsessed with image, right? So the idea that he would let his eyes stay closed knowing that the cameras are on. I mean, I just, it doesn't make any sense to me. I think the only way this happens is that he's

drifting off. In fact, you can see his eyebrows raised at one point like he's dreaming of sheep or, you know, beauty pageant contestants or whatever it is he dreams about this. I would say this, though. I will say this. First of all, if you were listening to what they were talking about in the meeting, very boring. I would fall asleep. Two, though, is that sometimes he falls asleep in these meetings where they're just

effusively praising him, or they're like, oh, no one's ever done it better than you, Mr. President. So the New York Times had a great article on if you saw it, where they like quantified all, like, the flag. Oh, yeah. It was so good. Anyways, I encourage people to look at it. I mean, there's like three buckets of, like, praise.

Well, there's praise him for being great and visionary. There's Bash Biden for being horrible. And then there's like, no one else could do this type of thing. To fall asleep in that, though, that seems extraordinary for Trump because there's nothing he likes more than that shit. Yeah, although he gets so much of it. Maybe he does get bored with the flattery. I mean, everybody's doing that to you all the time.

I mean, so what's the longest cabinet meeting? I think it was like three and a half hours. Three and a half would be long. Yeah. That's really long. They had three and a halfer? There was one that was about three. I watched the whole thing.

It was amazing. They just let everybody talk and eventually they learned not to do that. It must have been one of the early ones when everyone's trying to impress, right? No, they've been that. They've been like two hours is pretty standard now, I think. Right. So they go around the table. They're all talking.

They're all talking about the dear leader and how amazing he is and powerful. I bet he does get, you know, it's the same thing after a while. And he is old. And he's zoning. out. So maybe the fact that he's falling, you could say the fact that he's falling asleep means he's too old to be president. You could also say anyone would fall asleep, listening to that, and therefore maybe the cabinet meetings shouldn't be two hours long and fall of all this garbage. That is the good point. It's like you can actually not have these cabinet meetings

that long. If you're tired and you've been working a lot, which I don't think Trump has been, but you're just tired because you've been playing a lot of golf, you know, you want to nap or something, just don't do the cabinet meeting or do it in private. You don't need to televise it. We're joking a lot here, but there's some real world implications here, for real. So the three meetings he's had at Walter Reed, one was in April 2025. It was what they called the routine annual physical examination. The other was October 2025, which was just scheduled follow-up and evaluation and included a CAT scan. And then May 2026 was what they called a routine medical and dental checkup. Should note that he also saw his dentist in Florida recently.

so that's a secondary dental checkup. The CAT scan one was the most interesting because there was so many, you know, there's a lot of speculation basically about what was, because he kept saying I got an MRI. And everyone was like, well, what was it for? Like, why? And they just wouldn't say anything.

And then at one point he was asked while in Air Force One, what did you get an MRI on? And he didn't seem to know. So let's play that video. Are they asked about my MRI? No. MRIs are very going to know what it was going to release the MRI records will you tell us what it was governor wolves you mean the incompetent governor wall so if they want to release it it's okay with me

to release it's perfect what would please what they were looking at for what releasing no no no what part of your body was the MRI looking at i have no idea it was just an MRI what part of the body it wasn't the brain because i took a cognitive test and i hasted them Sam, it's a, I got a perfect result, but I don't know what it was of. Like, like the guy just, it just none of it adds up, right? What do you think he's, but what do you think it is? I mean, we're, we're now trying to like get our head inside some insanity. But like, does he actually not know?

Does he know and he's being not forthcoming? Like, none of those, none of those answers are great. No, no. Look, the stuff about how. great the exam was. That's just bullshit, right? So that's a reflex for him. It's regardless of whether he knows anything. And he plainly doesn't know what went on here. Now, a lot of us have dealt with people who have had medical exams and they don't really remember what it was and what the result was. And they can say whatever they like about it. They are generally old people who are losing their

grip on reality. And that's, you know, back to your point about how serious this is, one of them is in the White House and he's got his finger on the nuclear button. And this is a thing that's really hard to hide from people. You can go around and do this North Korean garbage about how we have the most perfect, you know, test results ever. I aced all my cognitive stuff. But ordinary people have dealt with a parent, a grandparent, somebody in their family. They have seen these symptoms and they know how serious it is. And they know that that person shouldn't even have the keys to the car, much less the keys to the White House. So they did subsequently. put out a statement about it wasn't an MRI, it was a CAT scan.

And the doctor said that it was to, quote, definitively rule out any cardiovascular issues, which is why they went and got the scan. Quote, the president agreed, and our team of consultants performed a CAT scan. As we revealed in the post-examination report, the advanced imaging was perfectly normal and revealed absolutely no abnormalities. But to your point, like, look, he's about to turn 80. we can see with our own eyes that he has well, you know, inflamed ankles,

that whatever the hell is on his hands, which they initially said was from shaking hands with too many people, but then the same scars were on the other hand, so he's not like doing, you're not shaking hands like this. Yeah. He obviously has impairments,

and there's, I want to just stress this, that's totally to be expected. you're 79, about to be 80, you're old, you're not in the, you know, you don't have the best diet. Like, you should not be in perfect health. And it's totally fine to admit that you're not in perfect health. What's not fine is to be incredibly secretive of that. And we just went through this with the Biden White House, just went through this with the Biden

White House, where we were all sort of looking for information on what was going on with Biden. And obviously there's a lot of chatter about if he's okay. Is he up to the task? And then it took a spectacular face plant on the public stage for us to realize he was really not okay. I mean, obviously people thought about that in advance of the debate, but it was firm after that. And I just don't know, like with Trump, I'm not saying it's the same as Biden, but like, it's funny that they don't, well, it's not funny. It's obvious that they didn't learn the lessons from the Biden years, which is that stonewalling is not actually the right call here. You should be forthcoming about this stuff. Yeah. And look, I would like to be fair

to the president and his family and the people around him. We don't really know, I don't know, the details of the medical stuff, although they should, they should reveal more. But not having said that, to this day, every week, if not every day, Donald Trump tells the press, Joe Biden was incompetent. He was too old. He was out of it. They hit it. They covered it up. He still says this stuff while he is doing it and while his own people are doing it in regard to his own health. So I'm not inclined to be forgiving to someone who is practicing that level of hypocrisy about mental and physical health and aging to this day. Yeah, and I guess the distinction here is sort of an immaterial one because Trump's public facing persona, crazy and insane as it is,

exudes an energy that makes people say, okay, well, of course he's fine because he's, you know, up all night, tweeting. That's insane, obviously, behavior. But he's up and he's active and he's, you know, giving and taking it with the press, and he's lobbying insults, and he seems when he's in a room when he's not sleeping, to have an abundance of energy. And yeah, sure, he crashes from time to time. But what you and I see of Trump, and we do see a lot, is a person who is, you know, still has some energy to him, whereas Biden was, for lack of a better word, sleepy. But that doesn't mean that health is problematic for one and not the other. There's plenty of stuff internally that we don't see that can impact Trump and obviously

could impact Biden. So this is why, and the last thing I will say is this, when you're president of the United States, you have a standard that you have to hit. the public hasn't trusted you with this job. And in return, you owe the public a bit of clarity about what's going on with you. And that could be in the form of releasing your financial records, like your tax returns, which he hasn't done on that either. And it's in the form of releasing your medical records, which he hasn't done.

And the lack of public outrage writ large over the fact that he doesn't release any of this stuff, he was right. He could just grin and bear it. and withstand it for a period of time, people move on because they've moved on. Yeah. I mean, to your point about the energy that Trump gives off, he does, in contrast to Biden, so Biden, you know, he talks about him being sleepy Joe, right? Trump does give off the energy. In fact, the speech that he just gave in New York this week, he was ripping and rolling. He was, you know, just one, you know, he does that weave, right?

It's one thing after another, and he's going, he shows a lot of energy in those moments. And I think his concern, and one reason why the White House is putting out, the RNC is putting out these tweets trying to make fun of the media, they don't want him to be seen as low energy. So falling asleep is low energy. I want to show I got lots of energy. I've got let that is different, though. You can have lots of energy and be mentally loose, be mentally out of it. So Trump, when he's doing the weave, when he, you know, his standard riff in the Oval Office, he wanders mentally around. He's showing energy sometimes.

But it's not coherent. It's not coherent. And when someone can't keep a grip on the theme, on the topic, they can't follow a chain of reasoning through, as he often doesn't, I mean, the fact that you are awake or that you're riffing cannot really hide that. I think people have figured out that he doesn't have it together in terms of thinking straight. Yeah. Let me just stress that sleep is great.

People should sleep more. I need to sleep more. There's nothing wrong with sleeping. A little power nap in the day is totally fine. In fact, we should encourage it. Really, it adds to your productivity. I might go take a nap right now. All right.

Will, thanks, buddy. Appreciate you. Our health correspondent, our health and wellness correspondent, Will Salton, on the case, as always. Going to go get the bulwark nap room. Are we going to get one of those? No, everything's got glass walls here. So people are going to be way too ashamed to take a snoo

in this office. They'll be ridiculed by their colleagues, unnecessarily, I would say. Listen, appreciate you, buddy. For those who've watched and enjoyed this and stayed awake through it, subscribe to the feed where you get great takes like this. Talk to you soon.