Six days passed between the president’s physical exam and the release of the doctors’ findings on Thursday. Even then, the anticlimactic unveiling raised only more speculation about the true state of Donald Trump’s health.
On February 8, Trump underwent a physical exam, according to the White House, which afterward released a brief press memo that said it was from the president’s new physician, Sean Conley. But the authorship of this report is questionable for several reasons, one of which is the sentence “The president is very grateful for the outstanding care he received today, and he especially wants to thank the doctors, nurses, enlisted and civilian staff who participated.”
It would be unheard-of for a doctor to praise himself in such a statement. Odder still is the subsequent assertion that Trump is “in very good health and I anticipate he will remain so for the duration of his Presidency, and beyond.” This sort of long-term prediction is atypical for any physician, much less one whose only charge is to assess the president’s ability to execute the duties of the office.
Read: The problem with Trump dictating his own medical assessment
It would inspire more confidence in the objectivity of the process if just once a doctor would simply share Trump’s test results in a transparent way. This has not been the case at any point in Trump’s presidency, during which his health reports have been inconsistent and sprinkled with—if not entirely written in—sensational prose. As a result, the credibility of the presidential health-assessment process and the professionals involved have entered a free fall.