Even after an Obama-appointed White House doctor said President Trump is in “excellent” health, mainstream media reporters – who routinely ignored and downplayed former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s physical collapse, uncontrollable coughing fits and self-reported memory failure – have declared open season on the president’s health, claiming the physician must be lying about it.
The White House press corps lobbed more than a dozen questions at Navy Rear Adm. Dr. Ronny Jackson on Tuesday, many suggesting President Trump is mentally ill or exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Jackson insisted Trump is in great health and received a perfect score, 30 out of 30, on a cognitive exam the president personally requested.
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“Could you just elaborate in layman’s terms, if possible, and you’ve done a great job at that, what you ruled out in these cognitive tests?” asked ABC’s Cecilia Vega. “You know, there have been reports the president has forgotten names, that he’s repeating himself. Are you ruling out things like early onset Alzheimer’s? Are you looking at dementia-like symptoms?”
The room went wild with questions from reporters who suggested Trump, 71, is mentally or physically declining, or even hiding his true weight.
CNN prediction: Trump to have heart attack in 3-5 years
Maggie Haberman of the New York Times suggested Jackson “may have arbitrarily made Trump one inch taller so that he would not have an obese body mass index.” She tweeted: “Remember that earlier physicals decades ago put Trump at 6-2. This physical has him at 6-3. It makes a difference on his BMI from overweight to obese.”
Other reporters asked for Trump’s waist measurements and whether the president has received a colonoscopy. They wanted to know if the physician is concerned Trump will have a stroke and if the president has a “drug addiction.”
One even asked: “Do you have a life expectancy range for him? Is he limited to one scoop of ice cream now?”
Another asked, “Does this president ask you about how he could follow his predecessor’s example to be as fit as Barack Obama was?”
CNN went so far as to diagnose President Trump with “heart disease” Wednesday, predicting he will have a heart attack in three to five years.
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During his Wednesday show, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed out the mainstream media double-standard in attacking Trump’s weight while repeatedly downplaying Hillary Clinton’s health issues during the 2016 presidential campaign. Limbaugh said:
This is the same media that never questioned Hillary Clinton when she could barely stand up! The same media that never questioned Hillary Clinton when she collapsed trying to get into a van to make a fast getaway after almost having collapsed at a 9/11 ceremony. The same media that never asked Hillary about her supposed concussions. The same media that never questioned when she was wearing those thick Coke bottle glasses because of her double vision! They said it was actually double vision; it was to prevent seizures.
The same media that never questioned when Hillary couldn’t finish a single speech without a prolonged coughing fit. There was never any concern for Hillary Clinton’s health, and we never had [CNN’s] Sanjay Gupta or any other doctor on mainstream media telling us, “She’s not well.” But Sanjay Gupta of CNN fame yesterday said, after he heard the numbers that the White House doctor reported for Trump’s cardiovascular system, “The president has heart disease.” Did you hear that? CNN, Sanjay Gupta: “The president has heart disease.”
This is the same bunch of people now obsessed claiming Trump is dangerously overweight, the same people that want Oprah to be president. …
This is pathetic. These people are … What’s the word? They’re obsessed, and the poison with which they’re obsessed is hatred. Hatred and resentment. But they are literally boiling with rage each and every day. I guess they expected these results to be deadly for Trump, maybe even in a literal sense, and they just can’t accept what they heard. It’s too good. It defies what they know to be true.
Questions about Hillary’s health not allowed
As Limbaugh said, the same mainstream media outlets rejected any questions about Hillary Clinton’s health during the 2016 campaign.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary, who took weeks off from the campaign trail, was spotted several times receiving physical assistance as she tried to climb stairs.
The following is a list of some of the health concerns she’s faced:
- ‘Potentially fatal’ blood clot: Hillary suffered from a “potentially fatal” blood clot in 1998 and has been taking blood thinners.
- Faints during speech: In February 2005, Hillary, who reportedly looked pale, fainted during a luncheon speech. Secret Service agents rushed to her aid and four people caught her before she fell to the ground.
- Breaks arm in bad fall: In June 2009, shortly after she began serving as secretary of state, Hillary fell and fractured her right elbow and had to undergo surgery.
- Blood clot, deep vein thrombosis: In 2009, Hillary suffered from yet another major blood clot, and her doctor, Lisa Bardack, said she had deep vein thrombosis.
- Another bad fall: In January 2011, Hillary tripped and fell as she boarded a plane from Yemen to Oman.
- Concussion after fainting, falling: In December 2012, Hillary sustained a concussion after she fainted and fell.
- Blood clot on brain: And in December 2013, a third blood clot was discovered on the right side of her head, between her brain and skull.
- Wore special glasses: In January 2013, Hillary wore “Fresnel lenses,” special glasses with prisms to prevent her from seeing double after her concussion and blood clot.
- Hyperthyroidism: In her 2015 statement, Hillary’s doctor revealed that the then-presidential candidate had hyperthyroidism and was taking Coumadin, a blood thinner used to prevent blood clots.
- Coughing fit: In October 2015, Hillary suffered a very public coughing fit while she was testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
- Coughing fit: In February 2016, she had another bad coughing fit during a speech in New York about racism.
- Coughing fit: In September 2016, Hillary suffered from a coughing fit in Cleveland.
- Collapse at 9/11 memorial: During a Sept. 11 memorial ceremony in 2016, a video went viral of Hillary collapsing as her aides pushed her body into a van.
- Yet another bad fall: Hillary was spotted with a special boot on her foot in October 2017. She claimed she fell backward as she ran downstairs in heels with a cup of coffee in her hand.
During the campaign, the mainstream media called reports of Hillary’s declining state “conspiracy theories” and even demanded news outlets stop talking about the issue:
- “The new birthers: Debunking the Hillary Clinton health conspiracy” – CNN, Aug. 24, 2016
- “A reader’s guide to absurd Clinton health conspiracies” – CNN, Sept. 14, 2016
- “The Hillary Clinton health conspiracies have gone mainstream” – Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2016
- “The Clinton health rumors aren’t going away anytime soon. Here’s why” – National Public Radio, Sept. 3, 2016
- “Hillary Clinton’s health scare: Real concerns vs. conspiracy theories” – NBC News, Sept. 12, 2016
- “Trump, allies push conspiracy theory about Clinton’s health” – MSNBC, Aug. 22, 2016
- “Can we just stop talking about Hillary Clinton’s health now?” – Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2016
- “Clinton campaign warns media to tread carefully” – The Hill, Sept. 8, 2016
Left claims Trump is mentally ill
As WND reported, without ever having examined Trump, psychological professionals have called the president “psychotic,” “narcissistic,” “paranoid,” “hypomanic,” “emotionally unstable,” “delusional” and “psychologically isolated” and claimed he has a “dangerous mental illness.” One physician suggested Trump could be suffering from an untreated sexually transmitted disease known as neurosyphilis.
And one psychiatrist who claimed to have briefed more than a dozen U.S. lawmakers on Trump’s mental state – demanding an “emergency” evaluation and even restraint by force of the president – may not even have a license in her home state of Connecticut.
As WND reported, Bandy Lee, an assistant professor in forensic psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and author of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” says she briefed Democrats and one Republican on Trump’s mental health status on Dec. 5 and 6. Lee and Harvard’s Judith Herman and Columbia’s Robert Jay Lifton recently released a statement warning that Trump is “further unraveling,” despite the fact that they’ve never actually examined the president.
Lee even claimed failure to address President Trump’s declining mental-health state could lead to “the extinction of the human species.”
Since her calls for evaluation and restraint of Trump were made public, Lee has deleted her Twitter account. Users of the site have claimed she’s not even a licensed psychiatrist.
Lee even insisted no “serious” psychiatrist would say Trump isn’t “dangerous.”
“It would be hard to find a single psychiatrist, no matter of what political affiliation, who could confidently say Trump is not dangerous,” she said. “I am sure there are some who feel unsure, or feel that they don’t have enough information or the expertise, and that is fine, since not everyone has devoted her 20-year career to studying, predicting, and preventing violence like I have. But there has not been a single serious mental health expert who disagrees on the medical side.”
How can psychiatrists evaluate President Trump if he won’t voluntarily submit to an evaluation?
Lee suggested a forceful evaluation, but she warned it could “really look like a coup”:
We encounter this often in mental health. Those who most require an evaluation are the least likely to submit to one. That is the reason why in all 50 states we have not only the legal authority, but often the legal obligation, to contain someone even against their will when it’s an emergency.
So in an emergency, neither consent nor confidentiality requirements hold. Safety comes first. What we do in the case of danger is we contain the person, we remove them from access to weapons, and we do an urgent evaluation.
This is what we have been calling for with the president based on basic medical standards of care.
Surprisingly, many lawyer groups have actually volunteered, on their own, to file for a court paper to ensure that the security staff will cooperate with us. But we have declined, since this will really look like a coup, and while we are trying to prevent violence, we don’t wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection.
Lee said she has been discussing this scenario with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and they “seem surprisingly OK” with what she had to say.
As WND reported last July, it has long been considered unethical for psychiatrists to “diagnose” politicians or public figures based solely on that person’s public actions or statements, without conducting an actual in-person examination. But now that Trump is president, a national psychology organization, the American Psychoanalytic Association, has given psychoanalysts the green light to publicly comment on Trump’s mental health.
Since Lee’s statements were made public, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement urging psychiatrists to stop trying to evaluate Trump when they’ve never even examined him.
“We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media,” the American Psychiatric Association’s statement said. “Arm-chair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.”
