President Trump will have his yearly check-up on Friday after hesitating to disclose health details for many years

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is currently undergoing his yearly physical examination, which could potentially reveal the first health updates on the oldest president to be inaugurated in U.S. history back in January.

“I have never felt better, but nevertheless, these things must be done!” Trump, 78, posted on his social media site.

Despite frequently raising doubts about his predecessor Joe Biden’s physical and mental condition, Trump has consistently opted to keep details about his own health a mystery, departing from the typical level of transparency regarding medical matters expected from the President.

If history is any indication, his latest physical is likely to produce a flattering report that’s scarce on details. It will be conducted at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and will be the first public information on Trump’s health since an assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.

Rather than release medical records at that time, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson – a staunch supporter who served as his White House physician and once joked in the White House briefing room that Trump could live to be 200 if he had a healthier diet – wrote a memo describing a gunshot wound to Trump’s right ear.

In a subsequent interview with CBS last August, Trump said he’d “very gladly” release his medical records but never did.

Trump is three years younger than Biden. But on Inauguration Day of his second term in January, Trump was five months older than Biden was during his 2021 inauguration – making Trump the nation’s oldest president to be sworn into office.

Before Jackson’s memo, Americans hadn’t seen key details about Trump’s health since November 2023, when Dr. Bruce A. Aronwald released a letter to coincide with Biden’s 81st birthday, saying Trump was in “excellent” physical and mental health.

The letter, posted on Trump’s social media platform, contained no details – such as the Republican’s weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, or the results of any test. Instead, Aronwlad wrote that he’d examined Trump that fall and found his “physical exams were well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional,” while also noting that Trump had “reduced his weight.”

Trump was treated at Walter Reed for his serious bout with the coronavirus in 2020. During that, Trump’s physician offered a rosy prognosis on his condition, though White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said some of Trump’s vital signs were “very concerning.”

After Trump recovered, more details emerged that he had been sicker than he’d let on.

But Trump largely refused to say more about his health at the time, instead submitting to a pretaped, remote medical “evaluation” and interview on Fox News Channel. That was conducted by Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox News contributor who had questioned Hillary Clinton’s physical ability to serve as president in 2016 and later urged the Biden White House to test the then-president’s cognitive acuity.

In November 2019, meanwhile, Trump’s trip to Walter Reed for a physical was omitted from his public schedule, breaking the White House protocol of giving advance public notice of them.

The visit was revealed three days later, with Trump disclosing that he’d had a “very routine physical.” The White House released a subsequent statement from the president’s then-personal physician, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, saying it had been a “planned interim checkup” kept “off the record” due to scheduling uncertainties.

Arguably, Trump’s most famous past comments about his own health came during a television interview in July 2020, when he listed off “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV” while attempting to demonstrate his cognitive abilities.

Trump said that a collection of those five nouns, or ones like them, stated in order, demonstrated mental fitness and were part of a cognitive test he had aced.