Donald Trump’s days of body slamming adversaries in the WWE ring may be well and truly behind him—but just how “unfit” for office is the incoming president?
Lest we forget, the Republican Party initially kicked off its electoral campaign with a winning strategy of targeting then-opponent Joe Biden’s marked decline in cognitive health, only for it to spectacularly backfire after the incumbent bowed out of the race to make way for a candidate 18 years junior to their own.
With Kamala Harris on the trail, Trump, 78, and not Biden, 81, was suddenly the old man in the room.
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Although the 60-year-old Democratic Party candidate’s youthful vigor (by D.C.’s exceptionally generous standards) has since failed to secure them the electoral victory they’d prayed for, concerns over the mental and physical well-being of the incoming Republican president have only continued to mount in recent weeks.
By the time he finishes his second term in January 2029, Trump will be 82, and the oldest serving president in U.S. history.
Throughout his political career, he has repeatedly attempted to restrict the public release of reliable information on his health, insisting on being in peak physical condition despite widespread speculation over self-evident risk factors including heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity, and a family history of dementia, to name a few.
Just one example of those insistences would include a 2015 doctor’s letter, later revealed to have been dictated by Trump himself, suggesting the Republican leader would then have been “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
He also once claimed to weigh 215 pounds at 6-foot-3, roughly the same as Muhammad Ali in the all-time heavyweight boxing champion’s absolute prime, despite White House doctors putting him at 244 pounds after his annual physical in 2020, technically pushing him into the “clinically obese” category on the BMI scale.
An earlier physical in 2018 also determined that Trump suffers from coronary artery disease, a common heart condition for men of his age. In 2021, it was further revealed the White House had been at some pains the previous year to downplay how seriously Trump had been affected by a bout of COVID-19, which had in reality resulted in such dangerously low blood oxygen levels that officials had raised concern he would need to be placed on a ventilator.
All things considered, and despite his best efforts, enough information has made it into the public domain for one doctor to speculate earlier this year that based on his physical health, the incoming Republican president likely has a less than 75 percent chance of making it through his second term.
That’s all before taking into account the massive GOP elephant in the room: Trump’s cognitive performance. From accidentally backing Biden as president and decrying “hummus” over the war in Gaza to… well, just a generally spectacular public descent into rambling incoherence, Trump’s well-documented list of gaffes is as long as it is, frankly, terrifying at this particular moment in time.
Depending on which experts you ask, these verbal blunders could be a sign of anything from early symptoms of dementia to mood changes indicative of an underlying narcissistic personality disorder, maybe both.
Ultimately, the jury’s still out on that front. In fact, with polls from earlier this year showing that 60 percent of Americans are already worried Trump is too old to serve a second term, the only thing that seems certain at this stage is that whatever his true state of mental acuity, it’ll now be a cold day in hell before anyone drags him unwillingly out of the White House.
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