Dr. Jonathan Reiner isn’t buying the White House’s explanation surrounding President Donald Trump’s MRI last month.
Speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN on Tuesday night, Reiner, a CNN medical analyst who served as the late Vice President Dick Cheney’s cardiologist for over 30 years, said that the White House’s claim that the MRI was preventative wasn’t “plausible or really credible.”
“There‘s no chance that this was just sort of routine preventative care,” Reiner told Tapper. “First of all, it‘s not part of routine preventative care… They disclosed that he had a chest scan and an abdominal scan. The president‘s doctor didn‘t even disclose what kind of scan. The president said MRI, all that the president‘s physician said was advanced imaging. Did he have an MRI? Did he have a CT? Did he have both?”
Reiner continued, “And what he didn‘t say is whether the president had a scan of his brain. He didn‘t say he didn’t, he just included some data from the chest and abdominal scans. So it‘s not plausible or really credible to believe that they just decided to do some preventative screening for a third time this year.”
“Almost certainly this is in response to some sort of a symptom or sign or concern.“ The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
When asked by reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday which part of his body was examined using the MRI, Trump responded, “It wasn’t the brain, because I took a cognitive test and aced it, I got a perfect mark. Which you would be incapable of doing!”
Reiner went on to suggest that the president’s gait—that he occasionally swings one of his legs when walking—could have prompted the scan.
Psychologist Dr. John Gartner mentioned the president’s gait during an appearance on The Daily Beast Podcast earlier this year, telling Daily Beast COO Joanna Coles that Trump’s “wide-based gait” was a sign of frontotemporal dementia.
“One of the dementia experts that I’ve consulted with is convinced he has frontotemporal dementia because of this symptom alone, which is it’s called a wide-based gait. If you look at his right leg, sometimes he just swings it like a dead weight in a semicircle… the expert that I consulted with said this is what we call pathognomonic. You don’t see this in anyone unless they have frontotemporal dementia,” Gartner said.
The president previously claimed that he had “no idea” why he needed to undergo an MRI during his medical checkup in October but added that it was “very standard.” The White House finally revealed on Monday that it was due to his advanced age.
Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, released a memo that read, “As part of President Donald J. Trump’s comprehensive executive physical, advanced imaging was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.”
Medical professionals including Reiner were quick to call the White House’s narrative into question, with Reiner noting on a Monday appearance on CNN that, “There really is no preventative cardiac MRI. This is not a standard test for an 80-year-old man to undergo advanced imaging.”
Dr. Jeffrey A. Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, also told The Daily Beast that advanced imaging has never been a standard part of a presidential physical.
“It’s just odd,” Linder explained. “[The White House] kept saying that this is standard for an executive physical, which, that by itself is not a thing. There isn’t a standard executive physical.”
“There’s nothing actually in the report that says whether he got a CAT scan or an MRI,” he continued. “It’s pretty nonspecific about what it is, and then it’s just weird to have a test like this in a 79-year-old.”
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