His doctor recommended increasing physical activity and losing weight. Are your hands covered in bruises? The White House blamed “frequent handshakes” and taking aspirin.
Photo shows new bruises on President Trump’s hand at Davos meeting
A photo of President Donald Trump’s hand shows a new bruise.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s annual physical examination showed him to be in “excellent health,” but his doctor recommended that he increase his physical activity and reduce his regular aspirin doses, which are causing widely-noticed skin bruising.
At 6 feet 3 inches tall and 238 pounds, his BMI is near the threshold for clinical obesity. But White House physician Sean Barbavera said he benefited from his busy day job and a lifelong abstinence from tobacco and alcohol.
“President Trump is in good health, indicating that his heart, lungs, nerves and general body function are in good condition,” Barbavera said in a statement announcing the physical exam. “His rigorous daily schedule, including multiple high-level meetings, official duties, and regular physical activity, continues to support his overall health.”
The medical report’s release late Friday night, May 29, followed several days of silence from the White House, which broke precedent by not releasing the results of President Trump’s routine medical exam at Walter Reed Medical Center immediately after his May 26 test at Walter Reed Medical Center.
The medical examination comes amid heightened attention to the president’s health, especially after a series of late-night social media posts and occasional tired demeanor during official meetings. Trump, the oldest president in history, will turn 80 on June 14th.
Barbabella said a comprehensive neurological examination showed the president was of “normal mental status.” He also had a scar on his right ear related to a gunshot wound from an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024.
Bruises associated with handshakes and aspirin
During President Trump’s second term, photos of prominent bruises on his hands went viral, raising questions among many Americans. His hands are often seen covered in makeup.
Trump’s doctor confirmed that Trump has “mild soft tissue inflammation” caused by frequent handshakes. It is also associated with the president’s relatively large regular aspirin doses. President Trump has been taking over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs for years to treat mild chronic pain and arthritis. He has publicly admitted to taking more than his doctor recommended.
“They say aspirin is good for thinning the blood, but I don’t want to thicken the blood to my heart,” he said in a January 1 Wall Street Journal interview. “I want thin, clean blood to flow through my heart, but does that make sense?”
President Trump remains close to obese levels
Trump has been overweight for years. According to the results of the physical examination, he remains near the threshold of clinical obesity. (A body mass index (BMI) score of 30 indicates obesity. President Trump’s score was 29.7 on the National Institutes of Health’s BMI calculator.)
His doctor said his heart age was about 14 years younger. Still, he encouraged the president to lose weight and exercise more.
That may be a tall order. In his best-selling 2016 book, Trump Revealed, his biographers say he “believed that the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy that could only be depleted with exercise.”
“All of my friends who work out all the time are going to get knee replacements and hip replacements,” Trump told The New York Times Magazine in a 2015 profile. “They are a disaster.”
Although the president often cites golf as his favorite physical activity, his aversion to exercise appears to have remained fundamentally unchanged. A few weeks ago, during an Oval Office event touting the return of presidential physical fitness tests in American schools, he joked that he was exercising “so much.”
“It’s about a minute a day at most,” he said. “If I’m lucky.”
Zachary Schermele is a Congressional reporter for USA TODAY. You can email us at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and on Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
