Trump's False Statements Read Like They Were dictated By A Man Who Thinks Adderall Is A Food Group

From Medical Reports To Supreme Court Rulings

On Sunday Trump’s latest false medical report was released by the White House, claiming he’s “is fully fit to execute the duties” of the presidency while laying out a few conditions, such as high cholesterol, for which he has been treated and the report describes as ‘well controlled.” It reads like it was dictated by a man who thinks Adderall is a food group. Yeah, “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Remember that?

Trump’s not just a liar— he’s a deranged, pathological fabricator who distorts truth to serve his ego and autocratic ambitions. This isn’t just about a shady doctor’s note. It’s about a man who tried to overturn a U.S. election, sat on his hands while hundreds of thousands died from COVID, and has clawed his way back to power filled with a desire for retribution. Every shred of propaganda from his camp— including his bogus medical reports— is part of his larger authoritarian project. The danger is real. Existentially real.

And yet… in the war against fascism, we must not blind ourselves to uncomfortable truths. Because while Biden is infinitely better than Trump in every way that matters— morally, politically, and cosmically— his own medical disclosures weren’t exactly a shining beacon of transparency either. His annual physicals, delivered by Dr. Kevin O’Connor, were professional in tone but notably omitted one key piece: a cognitive assessment. For a man who would have been 86 at the end of a second term, this isn’t a nitpick. It was a matter of public trust. After his stumbling and shocking performance at the 2024 debate, even some of his staunchest allies quietly admitted concern. Why no cognitive test? Why not lay to rest the right-wing talking points with hard, clinical facts? If we’re fighting disinformation, let’s not leave gaps wide enough for a Tucker Carlson segment to stroll through.

This isn’t a new problem. For much of U.S. history, presidential health has been treated like a national security secret— or worse, a campaign tool. FDR hid his declining health during his fourth term. JFK, the poster child for youthful vigor, was secretly dealing with Addison’s disease and a laundry list of chronic conditions. Reagan’s Alzheimer’s symptoms were whispered about but never formally addressed while he was in office. The presidency has always been stage-managed, but the Trump era turned it into full-blown reality TV— and Biden’s team, while nowhere near as egregious, was always playing the game instead of rewriting the script.

The stakes are too high for this bullshit. Medical transparency matters not because we want gossip fodder— but because democracy only works when the people are told the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We deserve to know exactly what it means that someone in their 80s is in the Oval Office— and we need to know from trained, trusted professionals, not from Kid Rock, Bill Maher and a handpicked personal doctor. We don’t need campaign fluff and doctor-penned propaganda. Just the facts. This report was “written by the president’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, who is also a Navy captain, [and] says that Trump “remains in excellent health” and “exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health.” It refers to Trump’s ‘frequent [fake] victories in golf events’ as an example of his ‘active lifestyle’ contributing to his physical and mental well-being... The health report states that Trump has gone through ‘a comprehensive neurological examination’ that revealed no abnormalities in cognitive function or his mental state. It says he scored 30 out of 30 points for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test for mental capacity in which subjects are asked to do simple tasks such as draw a clock that marks a certain time or repeat sentences that are read to them. A score of 25 or less is indicative of cognitive impairment.”

His past medical reports have been met with skepticism. One of his personal physicians said in 2018 that Mr. Trump had personally dictated a note, released under that doctor’s name three years earlier, that described Trump’s blood pressure as “astonishingly excellent.” The note said Trump, then a presidential candidate, would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Also in 2018, Dr. Ronny Jackson, then the [drug addicted] White House physician, wrote that Trump was in “excellent” cardiac health despite Trump having a high LDL cholesterol level of 143. (The report released Sunday listed his LDL level at 51.) Cardiologists unaffiliated with the White House said at the time that Trump’s physical examination had revealed serious health concerns and had indicated that Trump was at risk of a heart attack.

In 2020, Dr. Sean Conley, another White House physician, admitted that he had misled the public about Trump’s case of Covid-19 in an effort to reflect the White House’s “upbeat attitude” about the president’s condition.

Trump, a fast-food enthusiast, is fueled by a diet heavy on ice cream, red meat and soda.

The president has referred to himself as “very much of a germaphobe” and says he does not drink alcohol or smoke, which was noted in the report. He has said he sleeps about five hours a night. Medical reports have described him as standing 6-foot-3.

Trump is 6 feet tall and lies about his height so he won’t be classified as obese. But rather than worry about his vanity, we need to be worrying about his and his closest advisors’ authoritarianism. Yesterday, the National Review warned why the Kilmar Abrego Garcia controversy is important. Jeffrey Blehar wrote “In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia to America from El Salvador so that his claims can be adjudicated. (He currently sits there under an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for the use of his notoriously brutal mega-prisons to house potential deportees.) This weekend the Trump administration refused, claiming, on stunningly disingenuous logic, that because Abrego Garcia had been dumped quickly into El Salvador he was now beyond American jurisdiction. (“He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”) Why not just ask El Salvador to return him? Conveniently, President Bukele— who just happened to be in America on an official state visit— sat in the Oval Office yesterday morning and was able to answer that question: There’s just nothing I can do, alas. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” (Bukele proceeded to smugly chuckle with Trump about how it would be nice to be able to send Americans, too, to his mega-prisons.) What matters most about this cynical shell game is the transparent contempt for the law on display. Bukele is not his own man, after all; the purpose of his appearance yesterday was to read lines I can only speculate were at least reviewed by Stephen Miller, who sat in on the press conference to pretend that the Supreme Court had ruled 9–0 in favor of Trump rather than against him. Bukele, Trump, and Miller all wore Cheshire cat grins as they calmly told the world that the matter was out of their hands, even though all know the opposite to be true.”

And everybody understands why the Trump administration feels free to defy the law: It believes it has the people on its side. He’s an illegal, anyway! We’re here to deport illegals. Who cares exactly how they’re expelled from the country, that’s not America’s problem. Miller said as much in the Oval Office press conference with Bukele. His primary defense to reporters was, “If [Abrego Garcia] was your neighbor, you would move right away.” In other words: Trust us, he’s a bad guy, so who cares how we got rid of him?

We have seen this attitude on display already in various other facets of the Trump administration: in the casual disregard for protocol embodied by Elon Musk’s DOGE, yes, but also with other bungled deportations and most flagrantly with Trump’s openly lawless decision, ten days ago, to delay closing TikTok in direct contravention of the black letter of a bill voted for by Congress and signed into law by his predecessor. The Abrego Garcia case is only the freshest example of what is now a clearly demonstrated pattern of willingness— indeed, desire— on the part of the administration to flout the procedural, constitutional, and prudential limits of the law in every field.

This is no accident; it is a strategy. Whereas DOGE culture came preinstalled with the Silicon Valley ethos of “Move fast and break things,” the wreckage in that case was at least plausibly explainable as the product of accident: impatience and a lack of proper understanding that led to avoidable error. Meanwhile, others in this administration move fast in order to intentionally break things, to expand presidential power by forcing it down the throat of a quiescent legislature and a paralyzed judiciary. Although this approach assuredly represents the will of Donald Trump, the details of its legal execution are masterminded by Stephen Miller, whose fingerprints are all over the administration’s actions in the Garcia case. Trump has instincts; Miller has a plan.

What makes Miller’s maximalist theory of executive power scary is that it is analytical rather than emotional: His insight is not that presidential power should be wielded semi-autocratically but that it can be. And he is determined to test the outermost limits of that power, confident as he is that— having survived two impeachments and succeeded at reelection— the president is functionally beyond the reach of both the law and the demos itself. (Imagine the circus bear in The Far Side removing his muzzle and telling his friend, “Hey… these things just snap right off.”)

Trump cares only about public opinion; Miller trusts that the people will not care, so the law can be defied to serve Trump’s populist goals. I am terrified that he is correct. Who can force Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States? Who can compel Trump to execute the TikTok ban? Who among his own party would condemn him? Who of the opposition party could hope to topple him?

And what law then restrains the president? Yesterday in the Oval Office, Miller and Trump were forced to insouciantly pretend that the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled against them. What comes next, should the court “clarify” its position? Don’t be surprised to see the Trump administration drop the pretense and deny the validity of the Supreme Court’s rulings altogether.

Donald Trump added a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office— an addition reputedly encouraged by none other than Stephen Miller. The reason suggests itself ominously enough in the current context. Jackson is famous for many things, but none more relevant now than his reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832): “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

A test of the rule of law is coming. It is not enough to write about this phenomenon with clinical detachment; it must be opposed. If not, I assure you that the spirits unleashed by Trump and Miller, perhaps seemingly innocuous now, will eventually consume us all. I’m not here to persuade you. I’m here to warn you.