Name: No, You Don't Need to See President Trump's Medical Records
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No, You Don't Need to See President Trump's Medical Records

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at the US Military Academy last weekend, President Donald Trump appeared lethargic and occasionally slurred words. He seemed to have to his lips, and apparently leading away from his dais.The images caught fire on and in the . What might have been a nothingburger for any other elderly, overweight gentleman a day shy of his 74th birthday turned into a news peg—and for renewed demands that the president release results from a comprehensive physical examination, including a neurological assessment to determine if he had motor or cognitive disabilities.Well, here is a counterproposal: Nobody needs to see this president’s exam results except the president and his doctors. All the information voters need is already out.The problem of a president’s health—and how much the voting public deserves or needs to know about it—is a fraught one. It can feel invasive, ableist, or ethically wrong to demand medical information about another human. Yet questions about presidential succession have plagued interpretation and revision of the US Constitution. People who hope to represent Americans in the most powerful job in the world clearly owe some information about their physical and psychological health to those Americans. But how much?That depends. There are presidents, and then there is this president. That’s what Teneille Brown, a law professor at the University of Utah, has come to think. When she in 2008, she took a more generic view. No longer. “The genetics, the neurological scans, all of those things help us when we don’t have good info about how someone would behave. It’s beside the point now,” she says. “We have a window into his cognitive process already.” That would be Twitter.It’s not just social media, of course. Donald Trump has never hesitated to tout his own health and fortitude. He also uses health, or rather sickness, as an attack on his opponents. The of disgraced Trump aid Roger Stone hints that the Trump campaign spread rumors that his opponent Hillary Clinton had an unspecified illness. Trump’s attacks on her stamina and physical health during the campaign were (and sexist). He often calls people who disagree with or criticize him “,” and in 2015 he infamously by mimicking movements characteristic of the reporter’s congenital joint condition. Maybe extreme demands for more transparency and truthfulness about Trump’s own health feel somehow fair, or balanced.Stipulated, whatever’s going on with the president’s health—if anything—it keeps happening. In 2015, then-candidate Trump for his doctor to send, that he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” In 2018, the president’s physical that he’d managed to miss by thismuch the technical criteria for obesity—assuming you were willing to believe the official White House doctor at the time, Ronny Jackson, who was later from his nomination to head the Department of Veterans Affairs following accusations of fostering a hostile work environment and improperly distributing prescription medications. (Jackson, now in Texas on a pro-Trump platform, denies all that.) In late 2019, the president paid a to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda that his spokespeople and then-physician claimed was only routine, even though it and he rode in the presidential motorcade rather than taking Marine One, the helicopter, as he had on previous visits to the hospital.Most PopularNot all health issues are created equal. As a matter of medical and political ethics, maybe the only salient issues are those that could endanger a person’s life while in office—you want the person you vote for to finish their term, right?—or things that prevent that person from executing their duties. That’s why people worried that Ronald Reagan was showing signs during his second term of the Alzheimer's disease that killed him. And it’s the reason you’d assume people might be worried, in good faith, about Trump’s cognitive function.The age of candidates and presidents seems to be going up—Joe Biden is three years older than Trump. With age, chronic issues can become more debilitating. Possibly, neurodegenerative disorders might compromise someone’s ability to lead gradually by eroding executive function.But again, the general case here might differ from the specific. A test like the , which assesses cognitive status, might not say much more about Trump than what he has already revealed on social media? “There’s so much power the executive can wield that I think the public should know something about their mental health. That said, we have to walk a fine line because we don’t want to be ableist. We don’t want to assume that someone with depression, let’s say, couldn’t do the job,” Brown says. “But even our previous president didn’t give us the same kind of direct access to his thoughts that this president does … We’ve got his everyday ramblings—his stream of consciousness—in his Twitter feed. We’ve never had that with a president.”It does seem like the West Point ramp kerfuffle got past Trump’s ego-shields, for some reason. The president Streisand-effected the issue by, of course, about it: “The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long &amp; steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery.”In an with Michael Bender of The Wall Street Journal, the president—unbidden and unasked—went even further: “The general said, ‘Sir, Are you ready?’ I said, ‘I’m ready.’ And he led me to a ramp that was long and steep and slippery. And I said, ‘I got a problem because I wear, you know, the leather bottom shoes.’ I can show them to you if you like. Same pair. And you know what I mean, they’re slippery. I like them better than the rubber because they don’t catch. So they’re better for this. But they’re not good for ramps. I said, ‘General, I got a problem here. That ramp is slippery ... so I’m going to go real easy.’ So I did. And then the last 10 feet I ran down.”Which, you know, sure.Sometimes it’s not even the substance of the medical information that matters as much as the fact a president or candidate is willing to release it at all. Voters might want to know that a person in power values transparency, both personal and professional. “The issues that have come up with Trump in the last few days don’t really get at the heart of, are these incidents indicative of some serious disease? They might or might not be,” says Lawrence Altman, a physician and, for decades, The New York Times’ lead correspondent on the health of presidents. “The point is, he has not been transparent in the way he has released his medical information … and therefore questions always arose about his medical records or the information in the records.”Most PopularIs that suspicious? Frankly, yes. Presidents have obfuscated and outright lied about disabilities before—and not just the ones that didn’t matter to their leadership. Yes, Franklin Roosevelt and his aides famously covered up the fact that he was paralyzed due to polio. But then you’ve got, like, Grover Cleveland, who in 1893 underwent secret surgery to remove a tumor on a yacht in New York Harbor. Woodrow Wilson had a series of strokes in office that left him incompletely in control during the conference around the Treaty of Versailles. In 1919 he was totally incapacitated for four months while his wife covered for him and nobody knew who was actually in charge. , who campaigned in part on being young, energetic, and hearty, actually had Addison’s disease, various infections, and chronic back pain, and got by on shots of cortisone and pain-killers—and even briefly took an antipsychotic drug.So could Trump’s hesitant gait and tremulous water-sipping indicate a neurological disorder? Well, without a battery of tests, there’s no way to know. “One has to assume his doctors are aware of it and have taken it into consideration in examining him. We don’t know. We don’t see his records,” Altman says. “They don’t answer questions. So it’s fair game to question it.”This long history of presidential coverups—more the norm than the exception, really—have led some thinkers to a to presidential health. They say that things like the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, designed to figure out how to replace a president who could no longer carry out the duties of office (whether that president admitted it or not), doesn’t have the oomph it should. It asks, in part, that the vice president (who clearly has a conflict of interest) be the one to point out that there’s a problem with the president. So maybe an independent group should be performing the tests and reviewing the results. After all, pilots have to certify their health; so do some CEOs and judges. “Something that’s not affiliated with either party and would just do a high-level check—not just whether he can walk down a ramp, because who cares?” says Brown.An independent presidential health tribunal would have its own complications. It could be politicized, or compromised. “That review doesn’t have to be public, and maybe shouldn’t be. But the fact that there would be some independent oversight in this important area would be a reassuring thing to know,” says Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who has . “A reckoning with this is important, because there is a long history of presidents obscuring issues about their health, complicating matters at important inflection points in our history. It seems like something we should be better prepared for.”The point is, a full accounting of Trump’s health might be left to future historians. Its manifestation—his behavior—is on full display now. Even his planned events always seem off-the-cuff and spur-of-the-moment, more authentic than any president in recent memory. And he is, as the saying goes, Extremely Online. “With a different president who isn’t giving us such direct access to his thoughts, it may be more important to have a tribunal,” Brown says. But as in so many other ways, Trump is sui generis. “Even cardiovascular health, it’s obviously quite important, but we see in the day-to-day that he won’t take care of himself. He’s not taking care of his health in an acute way with a viral threat, so we can assume he’s not taking care of his health in other ways. We don’t need to see a cardiovascular report. He’s accepting very acute risk.”Most PopularWhen it comes to the health of the president of the United States, the point isn’t just to score points, to spotlight weaknesses or flaws for their own sake. It’s not actually useful to nyah-nyah at a president who claims to be physically strong but is not. The point is letting voters have an accurate picture of who they’re voting for. And when it comes to Trump, no matter whether you support or oppose him, you know the drill. “We don’t need to be looking at tea leaves. We have his tweets. We have his off-the-cuff statements,” Brown says. “We don’t need the same kind of transparency or information, because he’s giving it to us.” The accurate picture already exists. He painted it himself.More Great WIRED Stories writes about science and miscellaneous geekery. Before coming to WIRED, Rogers was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a reporter for Newsweek. He is the author of The New York Times science bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze.

at the US Military Academy last weekend, President Donald Trump appeared lethargic and occasionally slurred words. He seemed to have to his lips, and apparently leading away from his dais.The images caught fire on and in the . What might have been a nothingburger for any other elderly, overweight gentleman a day shy of his 74th birthday turned into a news peg—and for renewed demands that the president release results from a comprehensive physical examination, including a neurological assessment to determine if he had motor or cognitive disabilities.Well, here is a counterproposal: Nobody...

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Senior Correspondent/Wired. Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern https://indiebound.org/book/9781328518903 adam_rogers@wired.com

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No, You Don't Need to See President Trump's Medical Records

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