Amid widespread speculation about Trump’s health, the 79-year-old president recently told reporters he had an MRI, then said it was actually a CT scan.
Those remarks sprang back into the public square this week, after Professor Bruce Davidson, of Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, spoke to Blumenthal and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, co-hosts of the Court of History podcast.
Davidson said: “My impression is President Trump has had a stroke, and I think there's several lines of evidence supporting that. I think his stroke was on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body."
Davidson believes Trump suffered a stroke “six months ago or more, earlier in 2025.”
“There's video of him shuffling his feet, which is not what we'd seen him [doing], striding on the golf course … previously,” Davidson said. “We've seen him holding his right hand in his left, cradling. And earlier in the year, in 2025, he was garbling words, which he didn't do previously, and which he's improved upon more recently.
“And he's also had marked episodes that have been noticed of daytime, excessive sleepiness, — medical term, hypersomnolence — which is characteristic of many patients after they've had a stroke.
“… Most recently, there was video of him walking down the stairs from Air Force One, holding the banister with his left hand, although he's right-handed, and all of this is consistent with having had a stroke on the left side of his brain.
“A stroke is an area of infarction. It's an area of dead tissue."
Trump and the White House have repeatedly said Trump is in good health. Leavitt addressed Davidson’s remarks in statements to the Daily Beast.
“As the president’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, has made clear time and again — and as the American people see with their own eyes every single day — President Trump remains in excellent overall health,” Leavitt said.
“President Trump’s relentless work ethic, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in sharp contrast to what we saw during the past four years when the failing legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.
“Pushing these fake and desperate narratives now about President Trump is why Americans’ trust in the media just fell to a new all-time low.”
Leavitt also attacked Davidson, saying: “These allegations are absolute bulls--t and perhaps even slanderous. The individual making this false claim is a left-wing nutjob and Democrat activist.”
Speaking to Raw Story, Blumenthal said: “The Trump White House should release all of the records that Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller stole from Dr Harold Bornstein, who called the episode ‘a rape.’ One should assume that Trump still has those records.”
In 2018, Harold Bornstein, a New York doctor, told NBC News “he felt ‘raped, frightened and sad’ when Schiller and another ‘large man’ came to his office to collect Trump's records on the morning of Feb. 3, 2017,” at the start of Trump’s first term.
Bornstein had told reporters he prescribed Trump hair-growth medicine. A Trump representative called the records handover “peaceful, cooperative and cordial.”
Blumenthal, senior advisor to Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, also took aim at Leavitt.
“Instead of spewing invective in imitation of her boss, she should do everything that she can to provide the press and the public with the actual records, if she cares at all about her credibility,” Blumenthal said.
Now 79, Trump is the oldest president ever to assume office. Instances of him appearing to sleep during events or garbling sentences, and heavy bruising on his hands, have been widely reported. Trump has in turn discussed his health.
This month, he told the Wall Street Journal the bruising was caused by taking aspirin: "They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don't want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?"
Davidson said: "The instruction to take one full aspirin, 325 milligrams daily, is solely, only for prevention of recurrent repeat stroke after partial 50 percent or more blockage, occlusion of a large vessel in the brain. It's not recommended for anything for the heart, and we were told that President Trump's chest CT scan was … fine."
Of Trump’s remarks about CTs and MRIs, Davidson said: "A CT scan of the chest takes three or four minutes, and when you add the abdomen, that's another three or four minutes. An MRI is what we use to most carefully image the brain.
“You can image the brain pretty well with a CT scan, and that's emergency imaging of the brain, because it's more available, but an MRI gives you far more detail, and an MRI takes a minimum of 20 minutes, and they put this over your head, and it's extremely noisy, it's a banging sound, and they put headphones to block the sounds. So there is no mistaking an MRI for a CT.”
Davidson said he did not think Trump was suffering from dementia, as some have speculated as the president boasts about passing cognitive tests. Nor did Davidson think the 25th Amendment should be invoked, to remove Trump from office on grounds of incapacity.
But he said he detected evidence of a stroke in Trump’s increasingly brash and autocratic behavior.
“It is common after strokes for people to behave, as some people say, more like they were beforehand. So if President Trump had a brash personality, I think everyone would say, long ago, he appears to have become even more so."
