Watch now   Trump’s Hidden Health Crisis and the Assault on American Public Health I spoke with Dr. Vin Gupta of Meidas Health to find out what is going on Brett Meiselas Nov 29 By Ben Meiselas What is going on with Donald Trump’s health? I don’t ask that as a taunt or a talking point. I ask it as a citizen, as a parent, and alongside medical professionals like Dr. Vin Gupta, who runs our Meidas Health initiative and has devoted his life to public health. There is something very serious happening, and the White House is doing everything it can to cover it up. Trump has already admitted that he underwent an MRI. Pressed repeatedly about it, he first boasted about taking the test and then claimed he didn’t know which body part was scanned. That alone would be bizarre for an ordinary patient. For the president of the United States, it is alarming. As Dr. Gupta put it, “You do not get an MRI without a reason.” This is not a routine screening. You order an MRI when you are worried about something. Since Dr. Gupta and I first raised these concerns, reporting has begun to catch up. A recent New York Times piece detailed that Trump now begins his first daily event at 12:08 p.m. His official appearances have declined by roughly 39 percent compared to his first term, when he already didn’t start before 10:31 a.m. “You don’t, as president of the United States, begin your day at 12:08 p.m.,” Dr. Gupta said. For an older adult, he explained, normal aging usually means earlier wake times, not sleeping half the day away. Inside the White House, aides are alarmed as well. In a recent Oval Office meeting with New York City mayor-elect Mamdani, staff were reportedly so unsettled by Trump’s behavior that they questioned whether he understood who he was meeting or even who he was. Author Michael Wolff, who has deep sourcing in this administration, described a president who has always stayed “in character,” honed over 14 years as a reality TV star, suddenly seeming to forget the role he was playing. One insider told him “the only explanation was that the guy forgot who he is” and said the incident gave them a “25th Amendment shiver.” These are not partisan operatives talking. These are people who see the president up close. Psychologist Dr. John Gartner laid out what he sees as a pattern of cognitive and neurological decline. “The symptoms seem to point more towards frontotemporal dementia,” he said, citing deterioration in four areas: language, memory, behavior, and psychomotor function. He pointed to Trump’s garbled language, his failure to recognize key figures, disinhibited public behavior, facial drooping, and an increasingly wide-based gait in which he swings his leg in a semicircle. In an ordinary patient, he said, “a responsible doctor would give him both a neuropsychological battery and an MRI.” Dr. Gupta has been careful not to impose a formal diagnosis on Trump from afar. But he has been frank about what we can all see in public. “It’s clear that there’s age related cognitive decline,” he said. He described Trump’s slow response when someone fainted in the Oval Office, his fatigue and sluggishness at public events, and his tendency to mumble incoherent nonsense when confronted by basic questions from the press. He contrasted that with Presidents Obama, George W. Bush, and Biden, who all made visible physical activity part of their daily lives and public schedules. Trump, by contrast, spends his second term boasting about golf trophies while offering no evidence of real exercise. All of this is happening against a backdrop of aggressive secrecy and propaganda. The White House physician uses absurd language, calling Trump’s results the “best ever,” instead of providing straightforward medical data. They refuse to specify what the MRI was for. They insist everything is “perfect,” while hiding the report itself. “Give us the facts. Speak medically. Don’t editorialize,” Dr. Gupta said, calling the physician’s professionalism into question. If everything is fine, there is a simple solution: release the MRI report and relevant tests with appropriate redactions, the way a responsible government in a democracy would. Instead, the Trump regime is not only concealing the president’s apparent cognitive decline, it is actively attacking the broader health system that protects the rest of us. We discussed how the Department of Education is moving to strip nursing of its status as a professional degree for loan purposes. That may sound technical, but it is a direct blow to the people who keep patients alive. “There is no question nurses represent a professional specialty,” Dr. Gupta said, noting that nurses often spend twelve to fourteen hour shifts providing one-on-one care. By redefining their degrees, Trump’s team would make it harder for nurses to access the graduate-level loans they need to advance their training into advanced practice nursing, at the exact moment our aging population requires more highly skilled nurses. This is not an accident. It is part retaliation against a profession that stood up to Trump’s COVID disinformation, and part cynical cost-cutting in a system that already squeezes caregivers to the breaking point. At the same time, Trump has installed an anti-vaccine ideologue as the number two at the CDC, now the highest ranking medical doctor there. This official has questioned not just COVID vaccines but also basic childhood immunizations like the hepatitis B shot for newborns. Career scientists are leaving in protest. “There is quite literally nobody to stand up anymore against what we’re seeing,” Dr. Gupta warned, saying flatly that he cannot trust the CDC under its current political leadership. In response, states like California, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii are now banding together through the West Coast Health Alliance to build their own trusted public health messaging because they no longer believe the federal government will tell the truth. So this is where we are. We have a president who appears increasingly unwell, who will not be honest about his medical status, whose physician acts like a campaign spokesperson rather than a doctor, and whose regime is simultaneously degrading nurses, hollowing out the CDC, and empowering conspiracy theorists. This is not only a story about one man’s decline. It is a story about a government that treats the health of its people, and the truth about its own leader, as expendable. In a functioning democracy, the president’s health is not a branding tool. It is a matter of national security and public trust. The American people are owed transparency, credible medical reporting, and a public health system led by experts. Until we get that, the questions about Donald Trump’s fitness and the damage his regime is doing to American health will only grow. Watch my latest report with Dr. Gupta, and be sure to look out for episodes of Meidas Health on the MeidasTouch Podcast audio feed on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Meidas+ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.