President Donald Trump’s private health problems have been revealed in a new book, adding to a list of public symptoms the president has been battling since he returned to office.
Throughout his second term, the 80-year-old has tried to hide his chronically swollen ankles and bruising on his hands, and has been caught falling asleep during meetings at the White House and in the middle of other high-stakes summits.
He has also appeared in public with a mysterious neck rash, bragged repeatedly about “acing” a dementia screening exam that he claims measures intelligence, and become known for rambling off topic during interviews and speeches.
But the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, reveals that’s not even the full extent of Trump’s worrying signs of aging.
“He was also having trouble hearing, asking people to repeat questions they had just asked,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “Joint press conferences with world leaders were more often held in the Oval Office than in the East Room, in part because the acoustics were better, and he didn’t have to stand for an hour.”
And while the president has always been known for speaking his mind, “whatever thin verbal filter he had in the past was gone,” the book continued. Some of Trump’s aides began saying privately that for the first time he was beginning to seem old to them.
“Those who spent time with him could see the signs—the moments of fatigue, the cupped hand behind the ear,” according to Haberman and Swan.
The book also sheds new light on a symptom the Daily Beast has long reported on: his bulging ankles, which his doctors have said is the result of chronic venous insufficiency.
The condition occurs when the legs don’t pump blood properly back to the heart.
According to Regime Change, Trump was upset about the press coverage of his “cankles” and demanded that his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, address it during one of her media briefings.
Some of his aides thought it was an odd topic for the White House to formally address, and yet it was in keeping with the president’s obsession with his appearance, Swan and Haberman wrote.
His longtime aide and personal valet Walt Nauta carried around make-up, hairspray, Tic Tacs, a clothes steamer, and scissors so that Trump could trim his own hair when it got too long in the back and poked over his collar.
The president has tried to cover the bruising on his hands with makeup.
Despite personally dominating any room, his “his body could no longer fully conceal” his age, according to Haberman and Swan.
The irony is that Trump spent years attacking his predecessor Joe Biden, whom he called “Sleepy Joe,” for supposedly being too old and too tired for the role of commander-in-chief.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
