Bornstein: a hippyish figure, he wrote poetry, including an ode to a wrestling match
Credit: NBC NEWS
Harold Bornstein, Donald Trump’s former personal physician, who has died aged 73, hit the headlines in 2015 when he issued a letter claiming that the 70-year-old, overweight, junk-food eating would-be Republican candidate would “unequivocally” be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
Trump had been insinuating that Hillary Clinton, his putative Democratic opponent, did not have the stamina for the presidency, and when questioned about his own health ordered Bornstein to issue “a full medical report’’, predicting that “it will show perfection.”
Bornstein’s letter, a scrappy four paragraphs, went on to claim that Trump’s “laboratory results were astonishingly excellent”, but surprise was expressed in some quarters at the language used, one pundit calling it “the single most absurd letter ever written by a doctor in the history of the practice of medicine on earth”. Cynical hacks even detected the hand of the Tweetmeister himself.