Trump Goes on Late-Night Rant Attacking Harris for Having Seasonal Allergies
American presidents have dealt with myriad health issues while serving in office. Franklin D. Roosevelt contended with polio. Woodrow Wilson was partially paralyzed after a stroke. Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered both a stroke and a heart attack. But no medical condition may be more dangerous to the stability of the republic than the affliction plaguing Vice President Kamala Harris: seasonal allergies.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Donald Trump opined on his Democratic opponent’s health in a ranting post on Truth Social.
“I have just seen Kamala’s Report, and it is not good,” the former president wrote, referring to a memo about Harris’ health that the White House doctor released on Saturday. “According to her Doctor’s Report, she suffers from ‘urticaria,’ defined as ‘a rash of round, red welts on the skin that itch intensely, sometimes with dangerous swelling.’
“She also has ‘allergic rhinitis and allergic conjunctivitis,’ a very messy and dangerous situation. These are deeply serious conditions that clearly impact her functioning,” Trump added.
Urticaria — usually referred to as hives — is a common allergic skin condition that affects around 20 percent of people at some point in their lives. Allergic rhinitis and allergic conjunctivitis are the medical terms describing the runny nose and itchy eyes usually associated with seasonal allergies and hay fever. They’re extremely common and easily treatable.
Will the White House be required to spend millions on tissues and Zyrtec? How will Harris’ administration pay for such a monumental expense? What if she sneezes and accidentally activates the nuclear codes? Clearly no one in D.C. — a city notorious for its high pollen count — has ever considered these risks.
The White House doctor’s memo detailed Harris’ allergies, but concluded that she is in “excellent health” while noting that she “maintains a healthy, active lifestyle despite her busy schedule.”
Over the weekend, a group of 230 physicians and medical providers issued an open letter calling on Trump, who is 78 years old, to make his medical records public.
“Vice President Kamala Harris has released a credible, transparent update on her health and medical history, and Donald Trump has not,” they wrote. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances. And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”
Trump likes to brag that he is in perfect mental and cognitive health. On Tuesday morning, the former president wrote on Truth Social that he has “put out more Medical Exams than any other President in History, and aced two Cognitive Exams (the Doctor stated that my ‘cognitive exams were exceptional!’)”
“I am far healthier than Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, but especially, Kamala,” he added.
Many of the records released by Trump were produced by Dr. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician who was demoted in 2022 by the Department of Defense over misconduct allegations, and who has a clear fanaticism for the former president.
Trump is poised to become the oldest president in history should he complete another four-year term in the White House, and his age is showing. He seems incapable of forming a concise statement, and meanders and rambles in his public statements.
In 2018, medical records produced by the White House showed that Trump had a common form of coronary heart disease. In the years since, Trump claims to have gotten his cholesterol levels under control — something he went out of his way to point out when raving about Harris’ allergies.
“She is dying to see my Cholesterol (which is 180!),” he wrote.
While the former president didn’t specify which cholesterol measurement he was referencing, it should be noted that an LDL cholesterol level of 180 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) is considered “high.”
Trump has long been sensitive about attacks on his cognitive abilities or his bodily health. Former and current Trump advisers tell Rolling Stone that it’s a topic on which the notoriously bait-able Trump is even more easily baited.
“He basically has to respond to it,” a former White House official who remains in Trump’s orbit says. “He would get incensed in the Oval [Office] when he’d learned about attacks on his health and sometimes go on pretty long rants about how healthy he was … when we were supposed to be talking about policies … Then he’d want [the White House] to do kind of a full-court press on how great his mental and physical health is.”
Trump had not let the issue go as of Tuesday morning. “Kamala’s Medical Report is really bad,” he added in another post. “With all of the problems that she has, there is a real question as to whether or not she should be running for President! MY REPORT IS PERFECT – NO PROBLEMS!!!”
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