Reporters at the Daily Beast have grown accustomed to rude, belittling insults from the White House when they responsibly—and politely—ask for a response to stories they are writing about the president or his administration.
But this week, one of our reporters was called “mentally ill” for asking a simple question about Trump’s bruised hand.
We had clearly touched a nerve with a question on a topic that vexes the president more than any other: His health.
For almost a year, the Daily Beast has led the way in reporting on an issue that is patently clear to the naked eye. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, Trump, 79, is not a well man.
Just this week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker finally seemed to realize that the president not only has no clothes; he doesn’t know where he left them.
Thomas L. Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in the Times on Wednesday that Trump’s behavior has grown so reckless that the question must be asked, “Is America now being ruled by a mad king?”
On the same day, the Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a member of the editorial board, suggested that Trump “may even be flirting with cognitive decline for all we know.”
And in The New Yorker on Thursday, Susan B. Glasser had her own diagnosis for Trump of “untreated logorrhea,” giving the dictionary definition as “excessive and often incoherent talkativeness.”
These are conditions well known to Daily Beast readers, as we have been highlighting Trump’s cognitive problems for much of his second term.
But while the president’s mental state may be a matter of some debate, his physical condition is clear for all to see.
That became clear to the rest of the world—and, finally, to the rest of the media—this week when a huge, ugly bruise could clearly be seen on the president’s left hand as he unveiled the depleted line-up for his new “Board of Peace” in Davos, Switzerland.
By the time an exhausted-looking Trump arrived at his homeward-bound plane, the angry blemish was covered in a pancake of makeup.
Our reporter, Catherine Bouris, as every good journalist should do, submitted a request for comment to the White House.
She asked the White House Press Office’s shared email address whether the president’s application of makeup to his hands on the flight back to Washington was in response to growing speculation sparked by images of his bruised hand on stage at Davos.
“This is the third or fourth story the Daily Beast has written on this — are you mentally ill? Is the President so successful that you can’t find anything else to write about?” said the reply—anonymously.
The account is a 24-hour operation, but, generally, those who reply do not identify themselves. It is a veil of anonymity that they clearly feel lets them be uninhibited.
An additional comment was forwarded, attributed to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, saying: “At the Board of Peace event today in Davos, President Trump hit his hand on the corner of the signing table, causing it to bruise.”
A White House official then told Bouris that the president was susceptible to hand bruising due to his daily aspirin regimen and pointed out that there was no visible bruising before the ceremony.
But questions remain. They are the kind of questions the Beast has been asking the White House for the past 11 months, and the so-called mainstream is just beginning to raise.
For a vain man who goes to such trouble to pompadour his hair and perma-tan his face and considers himself indestructible, it seems incomprehensible that Trump would continue to allow his hands to showcase a medical problem.
If his daily aspirin regimen is, indeed, to blame for the bruising, then why does he take so many? In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said he takes 325 mg of aspirin a day, which is well above the “baby aspirin” dose of 81 mg usually recommended by doctors as a daily aid to heart health.
It seems inconceivable that such a conceited man would keep daubing his hands in makeup when something could be done to prevent the malady. Clearly, it has little to do with shaking hands, as the White House has previously claimed.
Could there be a more serious health issue we don’t know about?
Professor Bruce Davidson of Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine has speculated that the president suffered a stroke several months ago, suggesting that his sleepiness in meetings, shuffling feet, the cradling of his right hand in his left, and garbling his words are symptoms.
Unsurprisingly, Leavitt went on the attack, insisting her boss was in “excellent overall health.“
“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,” she added.
Donald Trump was the oldest person to be inaugurated as president, at age 78 years and 7 months, last January. It is only appropriate that the country should be concerned about his health, especially as Trump excoriated the media for failing to report on his predecessor Joe Biden’s mental frailties.
It is not just Trump’s hands. We have reported extensively on his swollen ankles, an ailment the White House attributes to the medical condition chronic venous insufficiency.
In the Journal interview, given in an attempt to kill off the growing questions about his health led by the Beast, Trump said he tried compression socks.
We have also reported consistently on the president’s cognitive difficulties. While he claims to have “aced” tests of his mental acuity, Trump has forgotten the names of the countries with wars he claims to have solved. In Davos, he mixed up Greenland with Iceland. He either forgot or didn’t know that hundreds of allied soldiers died in Afghanistan after 9/11. Trump insinuated they dallied behind the front lines.
The Daily Beast first reported on Trump’s bruised hands in February 2025 when a close-up photo showed makeup piled on top of discoloration on the president’s hand during a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in the Oval Office.
That was his right hand. The Davos bruise was on his left.
At the FIFA Club World Final in July, visible swelling was spotted around Trump’s ankles and lower legs as he sat between First Lady Melania Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino.
In October, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney tap danced around Trump’s ambitions to turn his country into a 51st state, but the American president’s cankles didn’t look up to a quick-step.
The compression socks, or whatever else the president was trying, clearly weren’t working as his ankles also appeared swollen a month earlier at a White House meeting with Polish President Karol Nawrocki.
Trump’s health issues were a sideshow to some high-profile talks.
His swollen ankles were all the more apparent when compared to Russian leader Vladimir Putin in August.
His left hand appeared ragged during a September meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump is old, and it’s not surprising that he is showing signs of his age as he approaches 80.
It is possible that a man who thinks he can do everything genuinely believes he can defy the years and carry on as though he is still in his prime.
With an administration that plays fast and loose with the truth, it is also possible that Trump will not want to admit to any weakness.
Power through strength, after all, is the motto of his presidency.
For the White House, using the troll-like veil of anonymity is not its most direct attack on the free press, but it shows its desire to denigrate and villainize those who hold it to account.
When we asked the White House for comment on this story before publication, they unleashed their most trollish instincts. Our editor Opheli Garcia-Lawler, who requested comment, was immediately mentioned by Steven Cheung, the White House director of communications, on his Twitter account, screenshotting a list of donations she had made many years ago to Democratic campaigns, long before she was a reporter at the Daily Beast. She was not covering politics at the time, and was not barred from making such donations by her then employers. Daily Beast reporters and editors do not make donations to political causes.
Cheung, an apparently single man in his mid-40s who Trump has repeatedly suggested should use GLP-1s, also said Garcia-Lawler had “shown her a–,” while the anonymous White House press office account provided an equally trollish quote from Leavitt, 28, a failed Republican candidate for a New Hampshire congressional seat, saying, “Does the Daily Beast realize that literally no one, except for deranged leftists, takes them seriously? Get over yourselves. You are not journalists, you are left-wing propagandists.”
Intriguingly, the email address the response came from had previously been used to make anonymous, misleading statements when the undocumented mother of Leavitt’s nephew was picked up by ICE. It claimed the woman had never even lived with Leavitt’s brother, the father of the child; in fact they had posed for photos at their home for a local newspaper.
Leavitt’s comments, Cheung’s trollish instincts, and their operation’s anonymous and misleading emails will not stop the Daily Beast and its brilliant reporters as we continue to ask the hard questions, and to inform our readers what we see.
Whatever names the White House wishes to call us.
The post White House Calls Daily Beast ‘Mentally Ill’ For Exposing Trump’s Decline appeared first on The Daily Beast.
