President Donald Trump has revealed that he takes more aspirin than recommended because he has been doing it for 25 years, and he is superstitious about changing his pill habit.
It is “good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart,” he said in an interview on Thursday.
The eye-popping admission of Trump’s daily aspirin use, which he disclosed to the Wall Street Journal, is against his own doctors’ orders.
And it is far from the only questionable medical take that the 79-year-old has made over the years.
Below is a look at Trump’s most baffling beliefs on medicine.
Vaccines and Autism
Nearly two decades before he appointed the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump was pushing an unproven theory that vaccines cause autism in children.
Trump, then 61, told leaders of the advocacy group Autism Speaks in 2007 that babies were getting too many shots at once, suggesting that childhood vaccines were causing autism rates to spike.
“When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’ve giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”
Trump was so concerned about autism and vaccines that he said he and his wife, Melania, had slowed the vaccine schedule for their son, Barron, who was then a toddler. He continued repeating his baseless belief that spacing out shots made any difference in preventing autism through his first presidential campaign.
Backwards Belief on Exercise
Aside from his many weekends golfing as president, Trump is not known for exercising. That may be because he has a backwards theory about how energy is stored and used by the body.
A New Yorker report from 2017 claimed that Trump believed the human body is like a battery, with a finite amount of energy. The belief is that exercise takes away the energy needed for other presidential tasks and is therefore bad for his productivity and longevity.
“Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy,” the New Yorker reported.
This, of course, is not backed by science. Those who are active regularly have more energy, according to the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic, and likely every health expert in the country.
Trump told the Journal on Thursday that his only exercise is on the golf course. “I just don’t like it. It’s boring,” he said. “To walk on a treadmill or run on a treadmill for hours and hours like some people do, that’s not for me.”
Windmills and Cancer
Trump’s hatred of windmills is well-documented. What is often forgotten is that the leader of the free world even believes that wind turbines might cause cancer.
At a Republican fundraiser in 2019, Trump said, “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, OK?”
“Wind turbine syndrome” and “wind farm syndrome” are terms for an alleged medical condition associated with proximity to windmills. However, the syndromes have been widely characterized as pseudoscience, with no scientific backing.
Reached for comment about Trump’s 2019 remark, the American Cancer Society confirmed to The New York Times that there is no evidence of ties between cancer and wind turbines.
‘Game Changer’ Hydroxychloroquine
Infamously, Trump hailed chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as “game changers” during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, encouraging his supporters to use the drugs despite there being little evidence that they were effective against the coronavirus.
Those medications, which have legitimate uses for the treatment of malaria and certain autoimmune disorders like lupus, were being doled out by the millions as a miracle drug to cure the coronavirus, Trump claimed.
“I hope they use hydroxychloroquine,” Trump said in April 2020. “What do you have to lose?”
The FDA revoked hydroxychloroquine’s approval to treat COVID-19 in June 2020 after studies showed it was not only ineffective in treating the virus, but also caused serious heart problems in some patients.
Of course, Trump offered other baffling remedies to COVID-19, like suggesting doctors inject disinfectants like bleach to cure coronavirus patients. The suggestion, which was not backed by science, led to a spike in bleach poisonings in places like Africa and New York City.
RFK and Tylenol
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, found an ally in Trump in September when he announced that there was evidence that the drug Tylenol led to autism, despite experts saying there is no confirmed link.
The leaders held a joint press conference to warn the public against Tylenol, claiming without evidence that the use of the popular pain reliever during pregnancy “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism.”
“It will take time for an honest look at this topic by scientists, but I want to reassure the people in the autism community that we will be uncompromising and relentless in our search for answers,” Kennedy said.
Trump immediately endorsed the claim, saying, “There’s a tremendous amount of proof or evidence, I would say as a non-doctor.”
The president added, “I’ve studied this a long time ago.”
More Aspirin, Please
In an explosive interview about his medical treatments, Trump admitted to the Journal in late 2025 that he applies makeup to his hands to cover up bruising caused by the large daily dose of aspirin he takes to thin his blood.
Trump’s doctor, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella told the Journal that Trump was suffering from “superficial chronic venous insufficiency” and takes 325 milligrams of aspirin a day—much more than the recommended 81 milligrams for “cardiac prevention.”
Despite his doctors’ recommendations, Trump said he trusts his own judgment and goes with the larger daily dose.
“They’d rather have me take the smaller one,” Trump told the Journal. “I take the larger one, but I’ve done it for years, and what it does do is it causes bruising.”
Trump said he is “a little superstitious” about his use of aspirin, which he claims to have taken daily for 25 years.
“They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart,” he continued. “I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?”
