Old Man Trump: Moira Donegan/ The Guardian

 

What’s going on with Donald Trump’s health?

Moira Donegan

The president’s appearance and schedule have sparked speculation – perhaps fueled in part by his political fortunes

Thu 18 Dec 2025 11.00 GMT

Is Donald Trump OK?

Recently, he’s looked tired. His famous fake tan is a bit more sallow

 than usual and seems painted on more thickly and clumsily than it

 was before. He appears to nod off in front of cameras more and

 more often, including in cabinet meetings and press events in the

 Oval Office. His public schedule is light: he is often at his golf

 clubs, has traveled around the country less frequently than at

 this point in his first term, and now only rarely holds the stadium

 rallies that once defined his preferred style of politics. He tends

 to sit, even when others are standing, and has shortened his daily

 schedule, often not conducting official duties before noon. A New

 York Times report found that his public appearances have declined

 by nearly 40% compared to his first year in office. He sometimes

 disappears from public view for days as he did in the late summer,

 and he and his administration have released unclear and

 conflicting information about his health. His right hand seems

 to be experiencing frequent injury or discoloration – it will often

 be covered with a band-aid or smeared with makeup; the White

 House has claimed, implausibly, that he is bruised from shaking

 too many hands. In some images, his ankles are visibly swollen.

Trump, at 79, is the oldest man to ever be elected to the presidency.

 And he ascended to the office after making his own harsh criticisms

 of Joe Biden, whose age became the subject of scandal after stiff,

 stumbling, and incoherent public appearances provoked speculation

 that his staff were concealing the extent of his decline. In 2024,

 Trump made Biden’s age and infirmity into a symbol of the

 inadequacy of the Democratic party, and the Washington elites’

 unwillingness to combat America’s backward slide. When he took

 office early in 2025, he placed a picture of an autopen – the device

 that became a stand-in for Biden’s incapacity in the rightwing

 imagination – in the place where Biden’s official portrait would

 have been on the “presidential walk of fame” that Trump installed.

 The notion was that Biden, too old to hold the office, was out to

 lunch, running the administration on autopilot – a kind of virtual stand-in rather than a responsible wielder of power.

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Now, questions about Trump’s own health and fitness for office

 are beginning to simmer. Trump revealed that he received an MRI

 in October, though he declined to elaborate on what his physicians

 were looking for, or what they found. “I have no idea what they

 analyzed,” he asserted to reporters on Air Force One. “But whatever

 they analyzed, they analyzed it well, and they said that I had as good

 a result as they’ve ever seen.” The president’s physician said in a

 letter that the scan was used to image Trump’s heart and abdomen,

 and that it was “preventative”. But experts counteredthat an MRI

 would not typically be used as preventative care, saying that the

 kind of scan that Trump received would usually be requested to

 monitor existing heart conditions or another underlying disease.

Trump also offered that “I took a cognitive test and I aced it.”

It’s not clear that anything is specifically wrong with Trump’s

 health, and it would be irresponsible to attempt to diagnose

 him here. But the speculation about his age and physical decline

 reflect a reality of his regime: that Trump is mortal, and that he

 is old. His reign—as the president, as the head of the Republican party, and as the gravitational center of American politics—is going to end.

It is possible that Trump’s health would not have become the subjec

t of so much speculation if his polling was better. The president has

 experienced a dramatic cratering in the public’s esteem; recent polls

 show him underwater in a majority of states and with almost every

 demographic. The shock-and-awe first months of his second term,

 in which he made sweeping changes to the federal bureaucracy and

 attempted to use the force of the executive branch to impose huge

 cultural changes at universities, corporations and other institutions

 reliant on government funding, has given way to a more tepid era,

 in which Trump’s power has diminished as it becomes clear how

 shallow much of his support really is. People are more willing to

 push back on him when his approval rating is in the toilet, and this

 pushback in turn makes him seem less mighty, less effective.

If Trump seems weak physically, then, it might in part be because

 he is at his weakest politically. The changing winds of public opinion

 have now seemed to quiet Trump’s ambitions to seek an

 unconstitutional third term, at least for the time being: 

Republicans are less willing to stick their necks out to help 

Trump attempt something so obviously illegal when his own ability

 to pull it off seems so slim. And with that change has come a broad recognition that Trump is a lame duck.

US democracy – or what remains of it – is not safe. It would not be

 safe if Trump was still at his most formidable, and it would not be

 safe if he vacated his office tomorrow. But his increasingly obvious

 mortality is beginning to change everyone’s calculations. Even, it

 seems, his own. Trump seems increasingly ponderous and reflective 

in his old age, and lately, he’s been talking about death more often.

 “I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound,” he said in October. “I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to make heaven.”

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist