President Donald Trump was back in public Tuesday to announce a new location for US Space Command headquarters — and prove that rumors of his demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Trump held court in the Oval Office this afternoon, breaking a weeklong absence from the spotlight that gave rise to viral theories that the president was seriously ill or had even died.
The rumors took over social media, rocketing around BlueSky and X among conspiratorial influencers who had already raised questions about recurring bruising seen on Trump’s hand.
Trump, who multiple sources close to the president said has long been self-conscious about his hand bruise, brushed off the speculation about his wellbeing and insisted he’d been “very active” over the holiday weekend.
“It’s sort of crazy,” he told reporters. “A lot of people know I was very active this Labor Day.”
Even as he kept out of the public eye, Trump was anything but silent. On Friday, he sat for a lengthy interview with the Daily Caller, weighing in on a range of topics from his crime crackdown to the war in Ukraine to his expanding White House renovation project.
He also posted compulsively to Truth Social over the weekend, at one point on Saturday publishing a 247-word missive — with attached video — recounting his confrontation with a subcontractor who he claimed had scuffed the new stonework in the Rose Garden.
“I did numerous shows and also did a number of Truths, long Truths, I think pretty poignant Truths,” Trump said of his social media activity. “I’ve been very active actually.”
Photographers, in the meantime, captured several images of him traveling to and from his Virginia golf course.
In a statement on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump “is perfectly fine and has a tremendous amount of energy.”
“The made-up speculation online is crazy and baseless, and it’s clearly being pushed by Democrat activists and left-wing lunatics,” Leavitt told CNN. “(Trump) has been completely transparent about his health with the public, unlike his predecessor, who went weeks without speaking to the media and spent a third of his presidency sleeping on vacation.”
Behind the scenes, the sources close to Trump said the bruising had been occurring long before he re-took office. He has had his hand evaluated several times, the sources said, each time with a similar conclusion that revolved around his age and use of aspirin.
Still, the evidence across the weekend that Trump remained very much alive has done little to quell speculation in conspiracy-minded corners of the internet that have fixated on his health since photos circulated earlier this year showing bruising on his hands, along with images from earlier this summer showing swelling in his legs.
The White House said at the time that the 79-year-old had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition in older people where the valves inside certain veins don’t work the way they should, allowing blood to pool in the veins. An examination found no indication of any more serious conditions, Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, wrote at the time.
“Chronic venous insufficiency is an incredibly common diagnosis,” Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health and an emergency physician, told CNN. “Assuming (Barbabella’s) reports are true, it would suggest that President Trump’s diagnosis is one that is almost incidental, and based off those reports, they’ve ruled out all of the dangerous things that could’ve been causing leg swelling.”
As for the bruising on the back of Trump’s hand, Barbabella attributed it to “minor soft tissue irritation” from a combination of frequent handshaking and Trump’s use of aspirin, which can make bruising more common.
The attention paid to the bruise has bothered Trump and made him self-conscious, and until recently he had taken to covering the bruising with heavy makeup. Issues with his hand, multiple sources say, date back to the campaign, when in one instance he bled after getting cut while he shook hands with a woman with a ring and long nails.
“He has now gotten over the self-conscious part—which is why you are seeing it more,” one White House official told CNN. “He made a decision to stop covering it and just own it because he knows people know about it.”
On Tuesday, Trump appeared to have discoloration on the back of his hand, possibly from makeup or from a bruise that had healed slightly.
The bruise’s visibility during last week’s Cabinet meeting — combined with Trump’s conspicuous attempt at times to cover it with his other hand — had revived the chatter online about his health.
In the wake of that appearance, the White House pointed to the earlier statement issued by Barbabella.
Trump allies have frequently played up his stamina and accessibility over the last several months, boasting about his constant interactions with the press and contrasting his dominance of the daily news cycle with his predecessor, Joe Biden, who had a far more limited public presence during a presidency shadowed by questions about his age and acuity.
But his intensive schedule seemed to only help fuel speculation when he did not list any public events on his official agenda for six days. Trump lunched with Vice President JD Vance last Wednesday and signed executive orders on Thursday in a session that was closed to press, before spending the long weekend shuttling between the White House and his golf course.
Before speaking Tuesday, Trump had not addressed press at the White House since Tuesday, August 26th, when he fielded questions from reporters during a marathon 3 hour and 17 minute public meeting of his cabinet.
According to a CNN review of the president’s daily guidance, those six days mark the longest stretch Trump hasn’t spoken to reporters in public since taking office — though he did sit for the interview with the conservative-leaning Daily Caller during that time. Trump also appeared where reporters could see him over the weekend, taking trips to his golf course on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of the holiday weekend, though he did not speak publicly.
It’s not unusual for the president, who often spends his weekends on one of his many golf properties, to eschew the press over the weekend and on holidays.
Trump, who will turn 80 next June, is already the oldest person to be inaugurated as president. And his reluctance to engage with questions about his mortality, combined with often-over-the-top testaments to his vigor by those around him — Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former physician, in July called him “the healthiest president this nation has ever seen” — has only heightened scrutiny of his health and fitness.
Ranney dismissed the sudden rush of theories about Trump’s health as the result of “pure speculation and the swirl of social media conspiracy theory,” rather than any concrete new information.
“I’ve heard lots of question raised,” she said of Trump’s hand bruising, noting older people have thinner skin and bruise more easily. “But based off the information that we’ve been given, one has to figure he’s just a little clumsy and is on aspirin.”
Still, Ranney encouraged close monitoring of presidents’ health as a standard practice, alluding to a “long history of non-transparency around presidential illnesses” dating back to efforts to conceal Franklin D. Roosevelt’s paralytic illness during his presidency in the 1930s.
“This administration has pledged radical transparency, and I think the American public deserves that,” she said.
Despite frequently calling cameras into the Oval Office, Trump so far in his second term has rarely traveled outside of the White House other than to visit his own properties. He’s also yet to revive the mega-rallies around the country that defined his campaign and became a feature of his first term.
Those changes have done little to slow the torrent of news generated by the West Wing, with Trump issuing new policy announcements, personal threats and political musings several times each day.
But with both parties already gearing up for next year’s midterms, the viral attention paid to Trump’s health over the last week offered a glimpse at how the president’s opponents might try to keep his wellbeing in the public eye and put Trump on the defensive over his age.
As speculation picked up online over the weekend, California Gov. Gavin Newsom posted an Instagram compilation of Trump that included clips of his bruised hand and him stumbling up the stairs to Air Force One — all set to Reba McEntire’s “I’m a Survivor.”
“He’s trying,” the post’s caption read.
CNN’s DJ Judd contributed to this report.
