Donald Trump will return to Walter Reed Medical Center on Tuesday for a physical, his third examination at the military hospital since the start of his second term. The visit comes three weeks shy of his 80th birthday and arrives under a cloud of renewed scrutiny over his health.
The White House said the appointment is expected to include medical and dental evaluations, along with a private meeting with military staff. Trump has repeatedly been photographed with deep bruising on his hands, sometimes covered with makeup at public events, while his lower legs have also appeared swollen. Video footage has at times shown him nodding off during public appearances, though the White House denies he has been caught on camera asleep. Trump has said the cameras captured him “resting his eyes,” and aides have argued that some images that appeared to show him sleeping were simply the result of blinking.
The physical matters now because it lands in the middle of a political fight over whether the president is fit to keep doing the job. Trump built much of his 2024 campaign on the argument that Joe Biden was too old to serve, and the contrast has only sharpened as Trump nears his 80th birthday. He has also repeatedly boasted that he has “aced” cognitive tests administered during his medical evaluations, a line that now echoes against the questions being raised about his stamina and alertness.
Those doubts are not confined to appearances. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted last month found that 44% of Americans believe Trump is in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president, while 40% said he has the mental acuity the office requires. That was a decline from September, when 54% said he was in good enough physical health to serve effectively. Last month, dozens of Democrats backed an effort to remove Trump from office after he threatened to destroy “an entire civilization” during negotiations to end the war with Iran. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of his allies, also said, “His mental capacity needs to be examined.”
Trump’s latest trip follows an unusually busy run of medical checks. In October, he went to Walter Reed for what the White House described as a “semiannual physical” and underwent a preventive CT scan of his cardiovascular and abdominal organs. His physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, said the results were “perfectly normal and revealed absolutely no abnormalities.” Trump had already had his annual physical six months earlier in April, and he also made two trips to his local dentist in Palm Beach, Florida, in January and May.
That record leaves the Tuesday visit with a simple meaning: this is not a routine stop that will end the debate. It will add another official checkpoint to a presidency already being measured through polling, public appearances, and the public’s own reading of what it sees on the screen. If Trump comes away from Walter Reed with a clean bill of health, the argument over his age and fitness will not disappear, but it will have to contend with another medical exam that his team says was thorough.
