I couldn’t possibly tell you anything about the state of Trump‘s health. I am not a physician or a dietician or a personal trainer. I have only very limited knowledge of his diet and his exercise habits. Given that, I would be hesitant to describe Trump as a man whose “physical strength and stamina” are “extraordinary“. But I guess this is just one of the many things that make me different to Trump’s former doctor, Dr Harold Bornstein.
Bornstein peaked his head into the news cycle in late 2015 when he released a letter vouching for the health of the then-presidential hopeful.
Addressed to “Whom My Concern“, the letter contended that, if elected, Trump would be, unequivocally, “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” In addition to expressing shocked awe at his physical strength and stamina, it also described his cardiovascular status as “excellent” and his blood pressure as “astonishingly excellent“.
The hyperbolic nature of the language used struck a lot of people as somewhat to familiar to the sort of grandiose exaggerations Trump himself was prone to making, something that Bornstein explained by saying that he bashed the letter out in five minutes and had “picked up his kind of language and then just interpreted it to [his] own“.
Pictured: “Astonishingly excellent.”
Bornstein has now taken that a bit further and said that, rather than the language being a product of proximity of Trump, it was a product of Trump himself. Bornstein told CNN in an interview that Trump “dictated that whole letter,” adding “I didn’t write that letter.”
Bornstein also says in the interview that in early 2017, his office was raided by Trump’s personal bodyguards and a number of other people, who took the original and only copy of Trump’s medical reports. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied that a “raid” took place and said that it is standard for medical records of the president to be collected.
