The day before Halloween, President Donald Trump landed at Joint Base Andrews after spending nearly a week in Japan and South Korea. He was then whisked to the White House, where he passed out candy to trick-or-treaters. Allies crowed over the president’s stamina: “This man has been nonstop for DAYS!” one wrote online.
A week later, Trump appeared to doze off during an event in the Oval Office.
With headline-grabbing posts on social media, combative interactions with reporters and speeches full of partisan red meat, Trump can project round-the-clock energy, virility and physical stamina. Now at the end of his eighth decade, Trump and the people around him still talk about him as if he is the Energizer Bunny of presidential politics.
The reality is more complicated: Trump, 79, is the oldest person to be elected to the presidency, and he is aging. To preempt any criticism about his age, he often compares himself to President Joe Biden, who at 82 was the oldest person to hold the office, and whose aides took measures to shield his growing frailty from the public, including by tightly managing his appearances.
Trump has hung a photo of an autopen in a space where Biden’s portrait would otherwise be, and disparages his predecessor’s physicality often.
“He sleeps all the time — during the day, during the night, on the beach,” Trump said about Biden last week, adding: “I’m not a sleeper.”
Trump remains almost omnipresent in American life. He appears before the news media and takes questions far more often than Biden did. Foreign leaders, chief executives, donors and others have regular access to Trump and see him in action.
Still, nearly a year into his second term, Americans see Trump less than they used to, according to a New York Times analysis of his schedule. Trump has fewer public events on his schedule and is traveling domestically much less than he did by this point during his first year in office, in 2017, although he is taking more foreign trips.
He also keeps a shorter public schedule than he used to. Most of his public appearances fall between noon and 5 p.m., on average.
And when he is in public, occasionally, his battery shows signs of wear. During an Oval Office event that began around noon Nov. 6, Trump sat behind his desk for about 20 minutes as executives standing around him talked about weight-loss drugs.
At one point, Trump’s eyelids drooped until his eyes were almost closed, and he appeared to doze on and off for several seconds. At another point, he opened his eyes and looked toward a line of journalists watching him. He stood up only after a guest who was standing near him fainted and collapsed.
Trump has prompted additional questions about his health by sharing news about medical procedures he has had, but not details about them. While in Asia, Trump revealed that he had undergone magnetic resonance imaging at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early October.
“I gave you the full results,” Trump told reporters, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician, which did not say that Trump had an MRI scan and contained few other details.
“I have no idea what they analyzed,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One recently after he was again asked about his MRI. “But whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well, and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.”
Trump also applies makeup to a bruise on the back of his right hand, adding speculation about a medical condition that his physician and aides say is caused by taking aspirin and shaking so many hands. In September, the bruising on his hand, coupled with swollen ankles, caused observers on the internet to speculate wildly about his health.
In response to a list of questions about Trump’s health, including about the results of his MRI and whether or not he was falling asleep in the Oval Office, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the president’s energy and pointed to Biden.
“Unlike the Biden White House, who covered up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and hid him from the press, President Trump and his entire team have been open and transparent about the president’s health, which remains exceptional,” Leavitt said in a statement.
For years, concerns and questions about Trump’s health have often been met with obfuscation or minimal explanation from the people around him. Trump’s physicians have not taken questions from reporters in years, including when he was seriously ill with COVID in 2020. There were no medical briefings held after an assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer.
According to his physician, however, he has lost weight. In 2020, Trump tipped the scales at 244 pounds, a weight formally deemed obese for his 6-foot-3 frame. This year, Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, said in a summary of the president’s health that he weighed 224 pounds.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.