At 78 years, 7 months and 8 days old, Donald Trump is the oldest president at inauguration in the history of the USA.
In December 2015, ahead of the billionaire’s first term as president, Trump’s personal doctor Harold N. Bornstein released a letter noting Trump’s parents had lived into their late 80s and 90s. Clearly prone to hyperbole like his patient, he even claimed Trump would “be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”.
The detailed document went onto state how the 6ft 2ins portly world leader had recently lost 15lbs and possessed “extraordinary” physical strength and stamina. The President, who has never had cancer or any form of orthopaedic surgery, had an “astonishingly excellent” blood pressure and “excellent” cardiovascular status.
A decade on from being pronounced the picture of health by his physician, the elderly politician has his own theories as to why he’s in such good nick. So what’s the President’s secret, apart from making several alarming policy changes as soon as he reentered The White House? We take a look…
McDonalds and Diet Coke
Jared Kushner once revealed that when his father-in-law was suffering from COVID-19 in 2020, it was a McDonald’s order that signalled he was on the mend. “I knew he was feeling better when he requested one of his favorite meals: a McDonald’s Big Mac, Filet-o-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake,” Jared wrote in his 2022 memoir Breaking History.
According to former campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, the President’s go-to order is two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted milkshake. Politico reported, meanwhile, that during his 2016 campaign, Trump would send his bodyguard Keith Schiller to McDonalds in Queens, New York, close to the Marine Air Terminal for Egg McMuffins in the morning or two Quarter Pounders with a large fries later in the day, while he waited in his limousine. He would also send Schiller on McDonalds runs from the White House for a quarter pounder with cheese, no pickles and extra ketchup, plus a fried apple pie.
Trump is a known fan of the fast food chain, once telling CNN: “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard.” In his 2018 book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, author Michael Wolff revealed Trump “had a longtime fear of being poisoned”, with McDonalds considered safe as the food is premade and no-one knowing he’s coming.
Trump washes down his 2,430 calorie McDonalds meals with his favourite beverage – Diet Coke. Following his inauguration, he reinstalled his famous soda button, which he used to order Diet Coke beverages during his first term in office.
Eating the same food every day won’t necessarily do you harm, according to one article in The Atlantic. Some people interviewed for the piece say opting for the same menu daily helped to reduce their stress levels, having a positive impact on their physical health.
McDonald’s says all of its food and drink can be incorporated into a balanced diet but eating it everyday is thought to be unhealthy due to its lack of key nutrients and the amount of saturated fat, sodium and calories menu items contain. And while Diet Coke contains few calories, the soda isn’t thought to be nutritionally good for you, with its sweeteners linked to weight gain. Trump himself once tweeted: “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke”.
Four hours sleep like Margaret Thatcher
Trump is thought to be in the 1 per cent of people known as “short sleepers”, joining an esteemed group of high-flyers known to survive on little slumber. “I would say he sleeps four to five hours a night,” Trump’s physician, Navy doctor Ronny Jackson, told reporters in 2018. “He’s probably been like that his whole life. He’s just one of those people who just does not require a lot of sleep.”
While the average person needs seven to eight hours of sleep a day, according to Professor Kevin Morgan, of Loughborough University’s sleep research centre there is no optimum amount of sleep hours, only a need to sleep long enough to feel refreshed when you wake up.
In an interview with Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Trump said he typically goes to bed at midnight or 1am and wakes at 5am to eat, read newspapers and watch television. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a known short sleeper too, surviving on just four hours a night, which added to her formidable reputation for being a powerhouse.
Former US President Barack Obama is said to have got about five hours sleep a night, while Bill Clinton said he was told by a college professor “great men often require less than ordinary people, some sleeping no more than five hours a day”. A study by the University of California found a rare gene mutation that families of short sleepers possessed.
No exercise
Eat well and exercise regularly is the key to long life, we often hear – but President Trump unsurprisingly thinks outside the box. “Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy,” Evan Osnos wrote in the New Yorker.
Apart from an occasional round of golf, travelling in a golf buggy of course, Trump’s only form of exercise is his campaign rallies due to his “battery” theory. “All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements — they’re a disaster,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2015.
In their book Trump Revealed, the Washington Post’s Mike Kranisch and Marc Fisher explained further: “After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.
“So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him: ‘You are going to die young because of this’.”
Staying sober
Despite making his fortune in the hospitality industry, with hotels, casinos and golf courses in his portfolio, Trump has never touched a drop of alcohol for a sobering reason. This makes him a first among modern US presidents and the reason is loss – Trump’s older brother Freddie died of an alcohol-related illness aged just 42.
“I had a great older brother who taught me a lesson,” he told Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast. “‘Don’t drink’ he said, ‘don’t smoke’. He smoked and he drank. He was a great guy, he was a very handsome guy, he was older, quite a bit older, and he had a problem with alcohol and smoking.”
The President described losing his brother as a “very tough period of time”. “If you don’t start you’re never going have a problem,” he told Fox. “If you do start you might have a problem. And it’s a tough problem to stop.” Trump once told how he feared he might have a gene which would make moderate drinking impossible, saying: “I couldn’t have been successful if I had that problem. And I think maybe I’m a personality type where I could have had the problem if I drank.”
He admits to being “very tough” on his children with respect to not drinking, smoking or doing drugs after his beloved older brother Fred Jr died from a heart attack. “The reason it’s good to talk about this is it might help other people,” he said. “If it helps one person, it’s worth a conversation.”
While some studies suggest teetotallers live longer than people who drink low levels of alcohol, other research has claimed a little alcohol can help you live longer. When it comes to cigarettes the evidence is extremely clear cut – smoking reduces your life expectancy by ten years on average, with 78,000 people dying from smoking-related illnesses each year in the UK.
