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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Book and I'm here with my partner in crime, Will Salatin, who is fresh off of a long weekend looking tanned, ready, healthy, refreshed. You get a lot of sleep, Will?
- [00:14]
B
I did get a lot of sleep. At the end, not at the beginning. How about you, Sam?
- [00:18]
A
No sleep.
- [00:19]
B
No sleep at all.
- [00:20]
A
I don't sleep anymore.
- [00:22]
B
You are the office yawner. If there's a yawn, it's Sam.
- [00:26]
A
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, Trump is good. He's fine. Nothing to discuss. Nothing to discuss here. Will, aren't you happy to know he's in good health?
- [01:26]
B
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.
- [01:44]
A
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 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 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.
- [02:13]
B
Yeah. And in fact, I mean, so first of all, Trump's, 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
- [02:28]
A
terms of presidents always Lie about their health. Let's just set the stage.
- [02:31]
B
Yeah, but, yeah, 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 next time.
- [02:49]
A
I don't even remember that.
- [02:50]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, they gave us 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. And we're left 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.
- [03:09]
A
I long for the days. Do you remember Dr. Harold Bornstein?
- [03:14]
B
Oh, the stoner. Yeah, yeah.
- [03:17]
A
Trump's original doctor with the long hair and the glasses and the coat, whose office was mysteriously raided. 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 country and 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.
- [04:46]
B
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, you know, in, in aging health. Because, you know, 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 millisecond 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 talk about him at the Cabinet meetings.
- [05:26]
A
Well, hold on. Let's play footage of Trump, which we do have, clearly dozing off during the
- [05:32]
C
earliest years of their children's lives. Second, we are cutting unnecessary red tape. 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, instead empowering parents to meet their child's unique needs. And then third, we're strengthening accountability to.
- [05:56]
B
It's just a blink, Sam. He was blinking.
- [05:58]
A
It's like an 18 second blank. Here's the thing. I'm not trying to defend Trump because I do think he's dozing. And like, whatever, like, I, I, I, I occasionally dose. 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.
- [06:25]
B
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, Right. 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 to me.
- [06:44]
A
It doesn't. You're right.
- [06:45]
B
The only way this, 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. They're going off.
- [07:00]
A
I'll 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 shit. Yeah.
- [07:45]
B
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.
- [07:55]
A
Three and a half would be long. Yeah, no, it was really long. They had a three and a half.
- [08:01]
B
There was one that was about three. I had. I watched the whole thing. It was amazing. They just let everybody talk and eventually they learned not to do that.
- [08:07]
A
But must have been one of the early ones when everyone's trying to impress, right?
- [08:11]
B
Oh, no, they've been that. They've been like two hours is pretty standard now, I think.
- [08:15]
A
Right.
- [08:15]
B
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.
- [08:40]
A
That is the good point. It's like you can actually, 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 tell us. We're joking a lot here. But there's some, like, real world implications here. For real. So the three meetings he's had at Walter Reed, one was in April 2025. It was what they called the routine annual physical examination. The other was October 2025, was just scheduled follow up and evaluation and included a CT cat. 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 1 was the most interesting because there was 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.