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Trump will be examined by a doctor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
Past presidents have also undergone annual physical examinations
President Donald Trump will undergo a physical examination early next year and allow doctors to release details of his medical evaluation, keeping with past precedent.
Trump will be examined by a doctor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in “the first part of next year,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Thursday.
“Those records will be released following that taking place,” she added.
Sanders’ announcement came a day after some questions were raised about the President’s health after he appeared to get a dry mouth and slurred his words toward the end of remarks he delivered on Wednesday. It was the second time in a month that Trump appeared to get a dry mouth in public, after he reached for a water bottle in the middle of remarks in November.
“The President’s throat was dry, nothing more than that,” Sanders said, criticizing questions about the incident a day earlier as “ridiculous.”
Past presidents have typically undergone annual physical examinations with a military doctor and released those records to the public.
President Barack Obama’s first physical record was released on February 28, 2010. President George W. Bush’s was first released August 4, 2001.
The records release will be the first time the American public gets a legitimate accounting of the health of the 45th President, who at age 71 is the oldest of any President at this point in his tenure.
Trump released a clean bill of health from his longtime personal physician last year that was widely panned as laughable for lacking details and offering an over-the-top portrait of Trump’s health.
“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Trump’s physician of 25 years, Dr. Harold Bornstein, said in a signed statement in December 2015.
Bornstein declared then that Trump “has had no significant medical problems” and called Trump’s blood pressure and lab results “astonishingly excellent.”
Trump’s health has also come back into the fore in recent days because of a book written by Corey Lewandowski, in which his former campaign manager describes Trump’s fast food-fueled diet.
Trump’s typical order from McDonald’s, Lewandowski wrote, consisted of “two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted.”
CNN’s Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
