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Sam Stein
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Will Salton
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Sam Stein
Hey everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Book and I'm here with my partner in crime, Will Salon, who is fresh off of a long weekend looking tanned, ready, healthy, refreshed. You get a lot of sleep?
Will Salton
Well, I did get a lot of sleep at the end, not at the beginning. How about you, Sam?
Sam Stein
No sleep.
Will Salton
No sleep at all.
Sam Stein
I don't sleep anymore.
Will Salton
You are the office yawner if there's a yard, Sam.
Sam Stein
Yeah, I'm like my dad. I can't. I can't sleep past like 5am before waking up. I try to go back to bed. Anyways, we're talking about this stuff because this video is about sleep, health and the physical well being of our President, Donald J. Trump, who for the third time in 13 months today, Tuesday, which is when we're recording this, went to Walter Reed for a medical checkup. Now, slightly abnormal to go that often when you're the President because you have a doctor on premises. First and foremost, you go to Walter Reed for like major imaging and things like that. But you know, he put out a post today, he said, just finished my six month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out perfectly. Thank you to the great doctors and staff heading back to the White House, President djt And so there you have it. That's our video. Trump is good. He's fine. Nothing to discuss here. Will, aren't you happy to know he's in good health?
Will Salton
Yeah. Yeah. So Forgive me if 10 years later, I assume anything Donald Trump says is false. Sam, what's that expression? My results from Walter Reed? Anybody's anxiety about my results are answered by my third visit to Walter Reed.
Sam Stein
You're raising a few more questions, Donald, by the number of visits you're taking to the Walter Reed Medical Center. What do you, I mean, like, who knows what to make of it, right? It could be, it could be nothing we don't know, but it could be something we don't know. They are so non forthcoming about this stuff in a way that I, I think it's worth emphasizing no president in modern history has ever been this secretive around their health. I mean, none. So we're left to guess.
Will Salton
Yeah. And in fact, I mean, so first of all, Trump, he's accumulated over the last decade such a reputation for lying that nobody trusts. I mean, you might have trusted some other president who like, wasn't as big of a liar. Although I think this goes all the way back to John F. Kennedy in
Sam Stein
terms of presidents always lie about their health. Let's just set the stage.
Will Salton
Yeah, but sure, yeah. And the other thing, of course, is that over the course of Trump's second term, he keeps going to these visits for Walter Reed and every time he goes, the information we get gets smaller and smaller. Have you noticed this? Like, yeah, like the first time they gave us test results and then the
Sam Stein
next time, I don't even remember that.
Will Salton
Yeah, yeah, no, they gave us the test results and then the next time they told us which tests, but they didn't give us the results and then they just said, then they didn't even give us that. So, so, and we're left with now with like Kim Jong Trump posting his like, everything's great. I have the best results ever. And that's it. That's all we get.
Sam Stein
I, I long for the days. Do you remember Dr. Harold Bornstein?
Will Salton
Oh, the stoner. Yeah, yeah.
Sam Stein
Trump's original doctor with the long hair and the glasses and the coat, whose office was mysteriously raided. Do you remember? That was such a weird storyline. But he put out a one pager, I believe that clearly was written by Trump, which was like, no one has ever been more fit to serve in office in the history of our yada, yada, yada. I think, actually I'm pulling up an article now. Borenstein told CNN later, after this happened, quote, he dictated that whole letter, he being Trump. I didn't write that letter. I just made it up as I went along. So clearly he was covering up something. And then obviously Trump had Ronnie Jackson as a, as a physician, who is Obama's physician at one point, and then became an incredible MAGA person. Look to your point, about like you protesting too much in a way. The, the, the, the RNC research account today, the Rapid Response 47 has been putting up a bunch of screenshots and maybe we can put up a few here while we talk of reporters who are blinking while on air, like literally blinking or looking down, and they're accusing them of falling asleep. So, like Dana Bash, Josh Dawsey, Jake Tapper, Dr. Jeremy Faust, they're all just caught in screenshots blinking and the RNC saying, ah, look at you, you fell asleep.
Will Salton
Yeah, no, they're just trying to make, they're trying to say that somehow the images of Trump with his eyes closed don't show that he's lagging, shall we say, in aging health. Because here we have a picture of you with your eyes closed. Of course, the difference is the picture of you with your eyes closed lasted a second because that was you blinking. And the picture of me, Donald Trump, was of me literally falling asleep over time in Cabinet meetings. And God knows I can't even remember all the other contexts. Anytime he's not talking, he's fallen asleep. I mean, to be fair, I'm falling asleep listening to them, you know, talk about him at the cabinet meetings.
Sam Stein
Well, hold on. Let's play, let's play footage of Trump, which we do have, clearly dozing off during the earliest years of their children's lives. Second, we are cutting unnecessary red tapes, red tape that forced providers to close limited access to care and made it harder for working families to find the support they needed. We're moving away from one size fits all federal mandates and instead empowering parents to meet their child's unique needs. And then third, we're strengthening accountability to.
Will Salton
It's just a blink, Sam. He was blinking.
Sam Stein
It's like an 18 second blink. Here's the thing. I'm not trying to defend Trump because I do think he's dozing and he likes whatever. Like, I occasionally doze. But if I were dozing in a meeting, this is what I would do. And so this is the case for why Trump maybe isn't dozing, because I'd be doing this. I do the head bob. I always do the head bob when I doze. And Trump's head did not bob. So that's the case I would make. Not that. Oh, everyone blinks.
Will Salton
Okay, so I'll give you that. But, Sam, this is a guy who's acutely conscious of being on camera, what he looks like on camera, wants everything to be perfect. Central casting.
Sam Stein
Right.
Will Salton
He's obsessed with image. Right. So the idea that he would let his eyes stay closed, knowing that the cameras are on, I mean, I just. It doesn't make any sense.
Sam Stein
It doesn't. You're right.
Will Salton
The only way this happens is that he's drifting off. In fact, you can see his eyebrows raise at one point, like he's dreaming of sheep or, you know, beauty pageant contestants or whatever it is he dreams about.
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Sam Stein
I will say this, though. I will say this. First of all, if you were listening to what was they were talking about in the meeting, Very boring. I would fall asleep. Two, though, is that sometimes he falls asleep in these meetings where they're just effusively praising him, or they're like, no one's ever done it better than you, Mr. President. We're so. The New York Times had a great article. I don't know if you saw it, where they, like, quantified all, like, the flatter. The cabinet. It was so good anyways. I encourage people to look at it. I mean, there's like, three buckets of, like, praise. Well, there's praise him for being great and visionary, there's Bash Biden for being horrible, and then there's like, no one else could do this type of thing to fall asleep in that, though that seems extraordinary for Trump because there's nothing he likes more than that. Yeah.
Will Salton
Although he gets so much of it, maybe he does get bored with the flattery. I mean, if everybody's doing that to you all the time, I mean. So what's the longest cabinet meeting? I think it was like three and a half hours.
Sam Stein
It was three and a half would be long. Yeah, no, it was really long. They.
Will Salton
There was one that was about three. I watched the whole thing. It was amazing. They just let everybody talk and eventually they learned not to do that.
Sam Stein
But must have been one of the early ones when everyone's trying to impress, right?
Will Salton
No, they've been that. They've been like two hours is pretty standard now, I think. Right. And so they go around the table, they're all talking, they're all talking about the Dear Leader and how amazing he is and powerful. I bet he does get. You know, it's the same thing after a while and he is old and he's zoning out. So maybe the fact that he's falling. You could say the fact that he's falling asleep means he's too old to be present. You could also say anyone would fall asleep listening to that. And therefore, maybe the Cabinet meetings shouldn't be two hours long and full of all this garbage.
Sam Stein
That is the good point. It's like you can actually not have these cabinet meetings that long. If you're tired and you've been working a lot, which I don't think Trump has been, but you're just tired because you've been playing a lot of golf. You know, you want a nap or something. Just don't do the Cabinet meeting or do it in private. You don't need to televise it. We're joking a lot here, but there's some, like, real world implications here. For real. So the three meanings he's had at Walter Reed. One was in April 2025. It was what they called a routine annual physical examination. The other was October 2025, was just scheduled follow up and evaluation that included a CT CAT scan. And then May 2026 was what they called a routine medical and dental checkup. Should note that he also saw his dentist in Florida recently. So that's a secondary dental checkup. The CAT scan one was the most interesting because there were so many, you know, there's a lot of speculation basically about what was. Because he kept saying, I got an mri. And everyone's like, well, what? What was it for? Like, why? And they just wouldn't say anything. And then at one point he was asked, while in Air Force One, what did you get an MRI on? And he didn't seem to know. So let's play that video.
Will Salton
They asked about my MRI. MRIs are very.
Sam Stein
Will you tell us when it was Governor Walls?
Will Salton
You mean the incompetent Governor Wall? So if they want to release it it's okay with me to release it. It's perfect.
Sam Stein
What were these?
Will Salton
Can you tell us what they were looking at? For what? Releasing.
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Sam Stein
What part of your body was the MRI looking at?
Will Salton
I have no idea. It was just an mri. What part of the body. It wasn't the brain, because I took a cognitive test and I aced it, Sam. It's a. I got a perfect result, but I don't know what it was of. Just. It just. None of it adds up. Right? Or. What do you think he's.
Sam Stein
But what do you think it is? I mean, we're. We're now trying to, like, get our head inside some insanity, but, like, does he actually not know? Does he know and he's being not forthcoming? Like, none of those. None of those answers are great.
Will Salton
No, no. I mean, look, the. The stuff about how great the exam was, that's just bullshit, right? That's just so. That's a reflex. For him, it's regardless of whether he knows anything, and he plainly doesn't know what went on here. Now, a lot of us have dealt with people who have had medical exams and they don't really remember what it was and what the result was. And they can say whatever they like about it. They are generally old people who are losing their grip on reality. And that's, you know, back to your point about how serious this is. One of them is in the White House and he's got his finger on the nuclear button. And look, and this is a thing that's really hard to hide from people. You can go around and do this North Korean garbage about how we have the most. Most perfect, you know, test results ever. I aced all my cognitive stuff, right? But ordinary people have dealt with a parent, a grandparent, somebody in their family. They have seen this. These symptoms, and they know how serious it is. And they know that that person shouldn't even have the keys to the car, much less the keys to the White House.
Sam Stein
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Will Salton
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Sam Stein
So they, they did subsequently put out a statement about. It wasn't an mri, it was a CAT scan. And the doctor said that it was to, quote, definitively rule out any cardiovascular issues, which is why they went and got the scan, quote, the president agreed. And our team of consultants performed a CAT scan as revealed in the post examination report, the advanced imaging was perfectly normal and revealed absolutely no abnormalities. But to your point, like, look, he's about to turn 80. We can see with our own eyes that he has, you know, inflamed ankles, that whatever the hell is on his hands, which they initially said was from shaking hands too many people. But then the same, the scars were on the other hand. So he's not like doing shaking hands like this. Yeah, he obviously has impairments and there's, I want to just stress this, that's totally to be expected. You're 79, about to be 80, you're old, you're not in the, you know, you don't have the best diet. Like you should not be in perfect health. And it's totally fine to admit that you're not in perfect health. What's not fine is to be Incredibly secretive of that. And we just went through this with the Biden White House. Just went through this with the Biden White House where we were all sort of looking for information on what was going on with Biden. And obviously there's a lot of chatter about if he's okay. Is he, is he, like, up to the task? And then it took a spectacular face plant on the public stage for us to realize he was really not okay. I mean, obviously people thought about that in advance of the debate, but it was firm after that. And I just don't know, like, with Trump, I'm not saying it's the same as Biden, but, like, it's funny that they don't. Well, it's not funny. It's obvious that they didn't learn the lessons from the Biden years, which is that stonewalling is not actually the right call here. You should be forthcoming about this stuff.
Will Salton
Yeah. And look, I would like to be fair to the president and his family and the people around him. We don't really know. I don't know the details of the medical stuff, although they should reveal more. But not having said that, to this day, every week, if not every day, Donald Trump tells the press Joe Biden was incompetent, he was too old, he was out of it. They hid it, they covered it up. He still says this stuff while he is, is doing it and while his own people are doing it in regard to his own health. So I'm not inclined to be forgiving to someone who is practicing that level of hypocrisy about mental and physical health and aging to this day.
Sam Stein
Yeah. And I guess the distinction here is sort of an immaterial one because Trump's public facing Persona, crazy and insane as it is, exudes an energy that makes people say, okay, well, of course he's fine because he's, you know, up all night tweeting. That's insane, obviously, behavior. But he's up and he's active and he's, you know, given and taking it with the press and he's lobbing insults and he seems, when he's in a room, when he's not sleeping, to have an abundance of energy. And yeah, sure, he crashes from time to time, but what you and I see of Trump, and we do see a lot, is a person who is, you know, still has some energy to him, whereas Biden was, for lack of a better word, sleepy. But that doesn't mean that health is problematic for one, not the other. There is plenty of stuff internally that we don't see that can impact Trump and obviously could impact Biden. So this is why. And the last thing I will say is this. When you're president of the United States, you have a standard that you have to hit. The public hasn't trusted you with this job. And in return, you owe the public a bit of clarity about what. What's going on with you. And that could be in the form of releasing your financial records, like your tax returns, which he hasn't done on that either. And it's in the form of releasing your medical records, which he hasn't done. And the lack of public outrage writ large over the fact that he doesn't release any of this stuff. He was right. He could just grin and bear it and withstand it for a period of time. People move on because they've moved on. Yeah.
Will Salton
I mean, to your point about the energy that Trump gives off, he does in contrast to Biden. So Biden, he talks about him being sleepy, Joe. Right. Trump does give off the energy. In fact, the speech that he just gave in New York this week, he was ripping and rolling. He had just one. He does that weave. Right. It's one thing after another. And he shows a lot of energy in those moments. And I think his concern and one reason why the White House is putting out. The RNC is putting out these tweets, trying to make fun of the media. They don't want him to be seen as low energy. So falling asleep is low energy. I want to show I got lots of energy. I've got. That is different, though. You can have lots of energy and be mentally loose, be mentally out of it. So Trump with the. When he's doing the weave, when he, you know, his standard Griff in the Oval Office, he wanders mentally around. He's. He's showing energy sometimes, but it's not coherent. It's not coherent. And when someone can't keep a grip on the theme on the topic, they can't follow a chain of reasoning through, as he often doesn't. I mean, the fact that you are awake or that you're riffing cannot really hide that. I think people have figured out that he doesn't have it together in terms of thinking straight.
Sam Stein
Yeah. Let me just stress that sleep is great. People should sleep more. I need to sleep more. There's nothing wrong with sleeping. A little power nap in the day is totally fine. In fact, we should encourage it, really. It adds to your productivity. I might go take a nap right now. All right, Will. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate you. Our health Correspondent. Our Health and Wellness Correspondent Will Salton on the case, as always.
Will Salton
Going to go to the Bulwark Nap Room. Are we going to get one of those?
Sam Stein
No, everything's got glass walls here, so people are going to be way too ashamed to take a snooze in this office. They'll be ridiculed by their colleagues unnecessarily, I would say. Listen, appreciate you buddy. For those who've watched and enjoyed this and stayed awake through it, subscribe to the feed where you get great takes like this. Talk to you soon.
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Will Salton
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Sam Stein
Some crimes are never forgotten. Others are lost to history. Those are the ones we focus on in Crimes of the Centuries, a History Meets True True Crime podcast revisiting murders, trials and frauds that once dominated headlines. I'm Amber Hunt, your host and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. If you like true crime that feels both cinematic and historical, find Crimes of the Centuries wherever you get your podcasts.
Hosts: Sam Stein & Will Salton
Date: May 26, 2026
This episode tackles the persistent secrecy and contradictions surrounding President Donald Trump’s health disclosures. Sam Stein and Will Salton dive into the President’s frequent Walter Reed medical visits, his history of dubious public statements about his well-being, and the broader implications for transparency, accountability, and public trust. Mixing wry humor with sober commentary, the hosts juxtapose Trump’s energetic public persona with the apparent reality of aging and the need for clarity from those in high office.
On Trump’s Health Claims:
On Old Age Symptoms in Leaders:
On Image vs. Substance:
Light Moment on Sleep:
Sam Stein and Will Salton explore why President Trump’s health cannot be taken at face value and why this matters. They unravel the shrinking public disclosures, contrast Trump’s blustery persona with the realities of age, and highlight the hypocrisy in how the Trump team handles the President's visible health concerns while deriding others—including Biden—for similar issues. Their conversation, both lively and incisive, stresses the obligation for transparency from those holding the highest office, warning that stonewalling endangers public trust and accountability.