He stays up late, phoning lawyers and lawmakers, while posting up to 150 times a night on Truth Social. His mornings involve calls with world leaders about the war in the Middle East, or talks with landscapers about replanting a bothersome tree. When he arrives in the Oval Office, his unstructured days unfold like a time-lapse video, with people zipping around him as he stays seated at the center of the frame.
As President Trump turns 80 on Sunday, he is so intent on projecting an image of relentless energy that he has installed a massive, mixed martial arts octagon on the South Lawn to mark the occasion. After watching the fight, Mr. Trump will depart Washington in the middle of the night and cross an ocean for a diplomatic summit in France. It is a schedule that seems devised to ward off questions about age and stamina as he begins his ninth decade.
But even for a president known for imposing his own reality on every situation, Mr. Trump is facing scrutiny over his age that has grown more intense with each passing year. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in February showed that nearly six in 10 Americans think Mr. Trump is growing more erratic.
On Monday, Mr. Trump appeared to doze off during a New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. That episode prompted such intense speculation that James Dolan, a prominent ally and the team’s owner, felt compelled to weigh in publicly, saying the president “was very much awake.”
On June 4, during an hourlong appearance in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump leaned to the side in his chair, closing his eyes for a few seconds as Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, spoke about the importance of coal.
Earlier this month, legions of online observers speculated, as they had before, that Mr. Trump was ailing when his public schedule contained no public events for nearly a week, a streak that began just after a physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Three days after that evaluation was completed, the president’s physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, declared in a summary that the 79-year-old Mr. Trump “remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological and overall physical function.”
So the oldest president ever to be inaugurated and his advisers spend a lot of time hitting back at people who have drawn a different set of conclusions about his health based on what they believe they can plainly see.
This week, senior White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about Mr. Trump’s health, said that when the president appears to slump or lean over at his desk in the Oval Office, as he did during an event earlier this month, he is doing it to lean closer to better hear someone speaking. (He leaned away from Mr. Zeldin and closed his eyes during the event on June 4th.)
Mr. Trump’s hand is frequently bruised and bandaged, but the White House officials said that was from all of the handshaking he likes to do. And he is not sleeping during public events, like the game at Madison Square Garden. He is just looking down, they said, or actively listening with his eyes closed. Other times, they believe he is the victim of selective editing or unflattering camera angles.
“The White House doctors are among the most elite physicians in the world, and they have released multiple comprehensive reports confirming President Trump is in excellent health and fully fit to carry out all duties of commander in chief,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “The president proves this himself every single day, taking nonstop questions from a hostile press corps and maintaining a relentless schedule.”
Still, Mr. Trump, like any president or medical patient, only discloses what he wants the public to know. His physicians have evaded questions about his health for years, including after a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pa., and when he was sick with Covid in 2020. Presidents are not legally required to share their most sensitive health information with the public, and the summaries they do share are in keeping with modern tradition rather than obligation.
Mr. Trump is part of a class of Washington politicians who have remained in power even as Americans have signaled concerns about aging leaders. Washington is a part-time home to the third-oldest Congress in history, and if Mr. Trump completes his term at age 82, he will be the oldest president to have held office.
“Somebody at 80 years old just doesn’t have the physical stamina, the mental stamina for that office,” said Rahm Emanuel, a prominent Democrat who is interested in running for president in 2028, and who has called for a mandatory retirement age of 75 for many top federal positions. Mr. Emanuel, who served as a chief of staff to President Barack Obama and a top aide to President Bill Clinton, said that the presidency is especially taxing.
“It ages you in a way that no other stress in your life does,” he said.
Some White Houses have been more aggressive than others at obscuring the truth of an aging president’s condition. As President Joseph R. Biden Jr. physically declined, his aides went to great lengths to obscure the signs of his aging. No one in Mr. Biden’s inner circle discouraged him from trying to run for the presidency again, despite indications that he was growing more frail.
As he ages, Mr. Trump has taken a different approach. He lets the cameras pick up his slumps, swollen ankles and bandaged hand. He continues to take a tall stairway wheeled up to Air Force One, often navigating the stairs carefully. He continues to appear before the news media, fielding questions from friendlier faces and lashing out at journalists who ask him questions he perceives as unflattering.
More often than not, he meanders far beyond the topic he has appeared before reporters to discuss.
“These are the strongest job numbers of the entire administration so far, and that’s during this conflict, on top of it. So it’s great. And, you know, we have a thing. We have a problem in this country, because it used to be, if you’re — I’m a little older than a couple of you, but I don’t feel old. I feel the same as I did 50 years ago. It’s crazy. Mr. Senator. We got a great Senator right here, Ron, but I do feel the same. But — but in the old days, you know, if you had good job numbers, like great job numbers like they announced today, the stock market goes up. Today, everything is crazy,” Mr. Trump said to a group of supporters in Wisconsin earlier this month, slipping an aside about his age into a monologue on other topics, including the U.S. war in Iran, his thoughts about the stock market, and a greeting for Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin.
The presidential historian Julian E. Zelizer, who has edited a book about the Trump presidency, said that it is hard to know what elements of Mr. Trump’s erratic behavior and meandering speech patterns can be attributed to age-related decline.
“He’s so unconventional, so to speak, and so different in how he acts as a president, including the way he speaks, that it’s harder for people to discern what is not normal for him as opposed to exactly how he’s been speaking since ‘The Apprentice,’” Mr. Zelizer said. “All of this makes it a lot foggier when these instances emerge.”
A call-heavy schedule
Mr. Trump’s public appearances are still limited compared with his first term, with most events falling between noon and 4 p.m., according to a recent analysis of his public schedule.
According to several people with knowledge of his schedule and habits, Mr. Trump gets somewhere between four and five hours of sleep a night. His late-night Truth Social sprees are conducted either by the president or by an aide, Natalie Harp, who has access to his account and shares flurries of posts with his approval.
The president heads to the Oval Office between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., but sometimes arrives as late as 11 a.m. He often starts his workdays on the phone in the White House residence before heading downstairs. Once he is in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump’s appointments often run long or bleed into each other, with aides and visitors staying for unrelated meetings.
In response to follow-up questions about the president’s most recent health exam and about Mr. Trump’s whereabouts during the weeklong period when he was out of public view, the White House provided The Times with a 15-page schedule of the president’s activities, may of which did not appear on his official schedule, from May 27 through June 10.
The document reveals a White House where Mr. Trump’s days often unfold in an unstructured cascade of phone calls during and between scheduled meetings and unscheduled ones. On the morning of May 27, the day after his physical, the president participated in eight phone calls, with the earliest at 7:15 a.m., before participating in a briefing to prepare for a cabinet meeting.
His afternoon included seven more meetings, including one about his White House ballroom project that ran for nearly two hours. He participated in three more calls, two of which were about Iran negotiations.
The next day, May 28, Mr. Trump held 11 calls and 8 meetings, and left the Oval Office at 11:35 p.m., according to the document. On several other workdays when he did not have public events, including May 29, June 1 and June 2, Mr. Trump left the Oval Office after 7 p.m. Lately, aides who sit outside of the office have started trading off evening shifts to make sure they are there when Mr. Trump decides to head to the residence, one senior official said.
All the while, Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account churned out posts throughout the day and often late into the evening. Between May 27 and June 10, Mr. Trump’s account posted 387 times — an average of 27 posts per day. Among the complaints about media coverage and endorsements of Republican politicians, dozens of those posts were about various White House and Washington construction projects, including his planned ballroom and the rehabbing of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.
Mr. Trump recently invited construction workers who had worked on the Reflecting Pool into the Oval Office for a photo, an appointment that was hastily added to his schedule when he decided he wanted to meet with them.
Several of Mr. Trump’s allies who have spent time with him lately at the White House, who were granted anonymity to describe their interactions with the president, said that he is more or less the same person he used to be, without any signs of diminished faculties. In one meeting, Mr. Trump forgot someone’s name. One recent Oval Office guest noted that in another meeting, Mr. Trump seemed more tired than usual, which that person attributed to his night-owl tendencies and late-night posting sessions catching up with him as he ages.
Defenders say that Mr. Trump has not lost a step, largely because he still takes questions from reporters.
“He’s not shying away from somebody throwing a fastball at him,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the pro-Trump podcaster and former White House aide. Mr. Bannon said that the president has grown more energetic as the pressure around him has grown, particularly as he seeks to end the war in Iran.
“History seems to have sped up, and he seems to be speeding up with it,” he said.
Tucker Carlson, an ally of Mr. Trump’s who has fallen out with him over the war, said in an interview that he did not think Mr. Trump has missed a step. But he said the president does not enjoy discussing the topic of his age and mortality: “He’s really uncomfortable with it,” Mr. Carlson said, adding that Mr. Trump often brings up elderly people he knows who he feels are in great shape for their age. Mr. Trump frequently references Gary Player, the 90-year-old retired golfer, as one example.
Mr. Carlson said that Mr. Trump’s intense focus on his ballroom project was about “an older man building a monument to himself.”
Medical questions
Late on a Friday evening two weeks ago, Mr. Trump’s physician released a summary of the president’s latest Walter Reed exam. The president had last visited the medical center in October for what his aides said was a semiannual checkup after a visit in April 2025.
In his latest report, Dr. Barbabella wrote that the president had been evaluated by a team of 22 medical professionals, without noting their specialties. The president had an echocardiogram and an ultrasound of the heart, after increased testing of his cardiovascular system last year and a diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that occurs when veins have trouble moving blood back to the heart. Mr. Trump has taken two medications to lower his LDL cholesterol levels.
Several cardiologists interviewed for this article said that it was encouraging to see that the president had managed his cholesterol levels and had reported a blood pressure within healthy range. But they questioned the use of artificial intelligence to provide an evaluation of Mr. Trump’s cardiac age, which Dr. Barbabella assessed as 14 years younger than the president’s actual age.
“There is no tool for using A.I. to make that kind of a statement that is accepted in the cardiology community,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist who studies the science of aging. “It hasn’t been validated to a point where it could be used for biological age versus chronological age.”
Dr. Topol also said that a CT angiogram, which checks for blocked arteries in the heart, turning back a clear reading was “very unusual” for a 79-year-old. In 2018, the White House physician at the time, Dr. Ronny Jackson, said that Mr. Trump had a calcium score of 133, indicating plaque in his arteries but at a level fairly common for a man of his age.
“The doctors deserve praise and he deserves praise because of managing his cholesterol,” Dr. Topol said. But he added that there were several areas of the report that lacked detail about the condition of Mr. Trump’s arteries. “It’s possible he has no buildup, but that should be specifically presented,” Dr. Topol said.
In a lengthy interview with The Times in January in which he fielded questions for hours on topics ranging from foreign policy to his health, Mr. Trump said that he had never been diagnosed with heart disease. He said that he had never had a heart attack.
And Mr. Trump, who has gained 14 pounds since his last physical, according to Dr. Barbabella’s summary, said at the time that he had never used a GLP-1 drug for weight loss.
Mr. Trump, who has called journalists seditious and treasonous for asking questions about his health, said that he attacked them because he had “gone out of my way to take physical exams more than anybody.
“I just feel it’s important, because I think that people that are president ideally should be in good health, and they should be good cognitively,” he added.
For this article, White House officials were given a detailed list of questions asking for more information about Mr. Trump’s latest exam, including an updated calcium score, which commonly accompanies angiogram results, and whether or not Mr. Trump has ever had a sleep study or been screened for sleep apnea, given his apparent drowsiness during the day.
The White House did not say whether Mr. Trump would take his doctor’s advice to lower his aspirin dosage, as listed in Dr. Barbabella’s health summary, or develop an exercise and healthy eating plan to manage his weight.
“Every one of the tests in question were completed, and they have all checked out perfectly,” Ms. Leavitt said in response to those questions. “President Trump has revealed more personal medical information than any president in history because he wants to be maximally transparent with the American public, and there is literally nothing to hide.”
Dylan Freedman and Chris Cameron contributed reporting from Washington.
The post Trump at 80: A President ‘Really Uncomfortable’ With Aging appeared first on New York Times.
