Donald Trump, America’s oldest first-time president, turns 72

President Donald Trump turned 72 yesterday, having returned to the fray of Washington politics after his grueling trip to Singapore for the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump in 2016 was the oldest person to assume the US presidency -- he was 70 then -- although Ronald Reagan was 73 when he was re-elected in 1984. Trump’s health, both physical and mental, have been the subject of keen interest in America.

He underwent an official physical in January and then White House physician Ronny Jackson described his health as “excellent.” When Trump was still a presidential candidate, his then personal doctor Harold Bornstein released a letter on Trump’s behalf in December 2015 in which he described the businessman’s health in grand hyperbole. It depicted Trump’s blood pressure and laboratory results as “astonishingly excellent,” his physical strength and stamina as “extraordinary,” and said he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Last month Bornstein told CNN that Trump had personally dictated the letter. Bornstein also said last month that a bodyguard visited his Park Avenue office last year and confiscated the president’s medical records. Bornstein said the “raid” took place on February 3, 2017, two days after The New York Times quoted the physician as saying he had prescribed Trump a hair growth medicine for years.