This is an adapted excerpt from the May 12 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Last month, Donald Trump had his annual physical examination at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Usually, health is a personal topic, but when it comes to Trump’s medical report, this story is explicitly not personal. It is about the country; it is about policy; and it is about the health of literally tens of millions of Americans.
What Kessler sees in Trump’s medical report is a success story.
Dr. David Kessler is a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who has served multiple presidents, Democrat and Republican. He was most recently a very senior science adviser to former President Joe Biden. He’s been the dean of the medical schools at Yale and the University of California, San Francisco. To put it simply, Kessler is a big deal. And, as a medical doctor, Kessler took a look at Trump’s medical report — and to him, it told a story, a “good news” story that he thought more Americans should know about.
“During his first term, a scan showed signs of plaque buildup in his coronary arteries, which put him at risk of a heart attack. In 2020, his body mass index was just over the threshold for obesity,” Kessler writes in a new piece for The Atlantic.
According to Kessler, that combination “would have made him a candidate for a GLP-1 drug,” like the weight loss drugs Ozempic or Wegovy, “and indeed, throughout his 2024 campaign, people speculated that he was taking one.”
Kessler goes on to write, “Then, last month, Trump’s latest physical showed that he had dropped 20 pounds, moving him from obese to overweight.”
As The Atlantic noted, Trump has never publicly said that he is on a GLP-1. When reached for comment, the White House did not address questions about the weight loss. In an emailed statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Atlantic that Trump is “in peak physical and mental condition.”
Kessler then shares what he calls the “most revealing aspect” of Trump’s medical report, “the list of drugs he is taking, which includes a combination that amounts to what doctors call ‘intensive lipid-lowering therapy’ — a treatment usually reserved for patients who are at significant risk of cardiac disease.”
Trump’s “weight is no more important than the fact that he is on that drug regimen and that it seems to be working: His LDL (the ‘bad’ cholesterol) has dropped dramatically in recent years,” Kessler writes.
What Kessler sees in Trump’s medical report is a success story, success against conditions that tens of millions of Americans struggle with: obesity and cardiac disease. That success appears to be largely thanks to medical science. According to his exam, the president is on two cholesterol-lowering drugs, the lipid-lowering “intensive therapy” that really does appear to be working for him.
We do not know if the president’s documented weight loss is thanks to Ozempic or a similar drug; certainly no shame if it is. It is not listed in his medical report, and the White House will not say one way or the other. (We also reached out to the White House, and they gave us the same response Kessler got.)
But the point here is not the president’s personal health. The point is that the president of the United States appears to be improving his own health through access to great medical care and medical science. That is what he gets. But, simultaneously, his administration is doing so much to hurt regular Americans’ opportunity to achieve those same good health outcomes.
The budget for the National Institutes of Health, the government research agency that produces much of the science for these drugs and countless others, has been slashed. Nearly $2 billion in research grants have been canceled.
The FDA, which shepherds drugs to market and makes sure they are safe, is reeling from staffing cuts, and the staff that is there cannot complete basic tasks because their government credit cards have reportedly been frozen.
The FDA, which shepherds drugs to market and makes sure they are safe, is reeling from staffing cuts.
Trump and his allies in Congress are currently debating how many hundreds of billions of dollars they are going to cut from Medicaid, which provides health insurance to tens of millions of Americans.
As for those GLP-1 weight loss drugs that can be a lifesaver for so many people, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden administration proposal to have those drugs covered by Medicaid and Medicare. Now the White House says weight loss drugs are expected to get a big price cut under Trump’s new executive order targeting drug prices, though that order does not have the force of law.
Trump is personally benefiting from the scientific and medical infrastructure the U.S. government has built up over decades, while simultaneously destroying that infrastructure for everyone else.