It was the bruise that launched a thousand questions.
When Donald Trump welcomed French President Emmanuel Macron to the White House for a bilateral meeting on February 24, 2025, it wasn’t foreign policy that seized attention.
It was Trump’s right hand.
Photographers captured what appeared to be a dark bruise there, partially concealed with makeup.
The images were plastered across the news and social media, forcing the White House to give what would soon become a familiar “explanation” for the bruising: Trump’s frequent handshaking.
“President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted at the time.
But then came summer, and the moment the story exploded beyond a single mark caked in make-up.
On July 13, Trump attended the FIFA Club World Final between Chelsea F.C. and Paris Saint-Germain, where cameras at MetLife Stadium caught more than his trademark red tie.
Photos showed what appeared to be visible swelling around his ankles and lower legs as he sat between First Lady Melania Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino.
And so began the social media frenzy—and inevitable speculation—over Trump’s rotund “cankles.”
Was it gout, the painful, inflammatory arthritis that stems from uric acid crystal buildup in joints? Was it something far more sinister? And was this yet another White House engaging in yet another presidential health cover-up?
As theories swirled and the media’s questions continued, Leavitt began her press briefing three days later with an attempt to shed some light on the issue.
She revealed that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), a common circulatory condition in older adults that can cause leg swelling.
As for his hands, she repeated that this was due to his handshaking—“and the use of aspirin,” which people can take to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.
Both ailments were described as benign, manageable, and not serious. The message was clear: Keep calm and carry on.
But by then, the story had momentum, having snowballed into a broader debate about age, transparency, and Trump’s overall fitness to serve.
On January 20, 2025, Trump—at 78 years and 7 months old—became the oldest person in American history to be inaugurated as president. And while the avid golfer and sports enthusiast insists he is in “great shape” for his age, he now finds himself facing the same kind of scrutiny that haunted his predecessor, Joe Biden.
The Daily Beast has been reporting on Trump’s health issues for months, before many other outlets began to do so.
“There is something going on with his health that they’re not telling us,” Jake Tapper finally acknowledged on CNN’s The Lead this month, after the Daily Beast cornered Leavitt about the president wearing bandages on his hand.
Other signs lately have become hard to ignore. On a number of occasions, the president has appeared to doze off during Cabinet meetings and public events.
The most recent naptime took place on Dec. 19 during a signing ceremony to reclassify medical marijuana.
Trump now regularly confuses names and dates, and his trademark long-winded tangents are becoming even longer, veering into bizarre segues on everything from wind farms and White House decor to First Lady Melania Trump’s underwear.
In one particularly troubling moment, Trump even momentarily froze as a man collapsed behind him in the Oval Office.
And his behavior has also become more erratic and uninhibited, featuring racist outbursts, angry tirades toward female journalists, and his heartless remarks linking the tragic murders of Rob and Michele Reiner to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Psychologist Dr. John Gartner believes these are all ”flashing signs of an immense cognitive decline.”
“Because of his cognitive decline, [Trump] is focusing on things like the [White House] ballroom and the paper that he writes things on,” the former Johns Hopkins professor told the Daily Beast.
The White House, however, insists the president is fit to serve and that any coverage about his health is overblown.
“As the President’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, has made clear time and again—and as the American people see with their own eyes every single day—President Trump remains in excellent overall health,“ Leavitt told the Daily Beast on Friday.
“President Trump’s relentless work ethic, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in sharp contrast to what we saw during the past four years when the failing legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people,” she continued. “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.”
Earlier this month, Trump also furiously lashed out at The New York Times over an article asserting that he is showing signs of aging and has significantly reduced his workload in his second term.
“The Radical Left Lunatics in the soon to fold New York Times did a hit piece on me that I am perhaps losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that the female reporter who wrote the article was “ugly, both inside and out.”
“There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (’That was aced’) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now!”
Still, the issue is unlikely to go away, with Democrat strategists telling the Daily Beast they are planning to make the president’s mental acuity and fitness a key issue ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Some, like presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom, Trump’s regular troller-in-chief, already have.
And instead of reassuring the public, the White House’s evasive and often defensive approach has raised fresh doubts.
Last month, for instance, Trump let it slip that his latest medical check-up on Oct. 10 included an MRI, which can highlight symptoms associated with conditions such as strokes, brain issues, or tumors.
However, the MRI was not disclosed in the report of the president’s latest visit to the Walter Reed Medical Center, and the White House has declined to explain why it was needed.
Then Trump inadvertently revealed that he had “aced” three cognitive tests, which are in fact screening tests for dementia. To this day, the White House has not explained when those tests were taken. And his last known medical exam in October did not refer to the assessment or his test score.
In the end, it wasn’t a whistleblower or a medical emergency that put Trump’s health under the microscope. It was the cameras—and a White House that reacted too slowly to what they revealed.
