It’s Not Just Donald Trump — The White House Has Been Hiding Presidents’ Health Issues For Over 100 Years

Many Americans have been wondering whether President Donald Trump’s bill of health is as clean as his administration wants us to believe.

In late 2025, the president boasted again about getting “all As” on his annual physical. But for that exam, Trump underwent an MRI that White House doctor Sean Barabella claimed was a routine preventative measure. Experts say that’s not a standard practice.

The president has sported poorly concealed hand bruises for months, which the White House claims are from “extensive handshaking.” In March, he developed a mysterious neck rash that was attributed to a “very common cream” as part of a “preventative skin treatment.”

Whatever the cause of his visible ailments, Trump wouldn’t be the first president to keep a health condition secret from the American public.

In July 1893, President Grover Cleveland underwent a secret surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from the roof of his mouth. To keep the operation covert, it took place on a boat.

The cover story was a four-day fishing trip aboard friend and banker Elias Cornelius Benedict’s steam yacht, Oneida. One newspaper reported: “The president desires rest and recreation.”

In reality, six surgeons removed the tumor, multiple teeth and much of Cleveland’s upper-left jaw in just 90 minutes. The procedure was deliberately done through the president’s mouth to leave no external scarring evidence and keep Cleveland’s trademark mustache untouched.

Investigative journalist E.J. Edwards broke the story the next month, but the White House denied the report. It wasn’t until 1917 that the American public knew the true story after one of the surgeons gave a tell-all account.

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a catastrophic stroke that his inner circle went to drastic lengths to keep hidden.

The president had embarked on a speaking tour to promote the Treaty of Versailles as an end to World War I. But the demanding schedule took a toll on Wilson’s already-poor health, and the stroke that followed left him paralyzed, partially blind and seriously incapacitated.

At that point, Wilson had already suffered multiple strokes between 1886 and 1906, before his presidency, that were not public knowledge.

Wilson’s wife, first lady Edith Bolling Wilson, insisted he not resign because she worried that leaving office would kill him. Instead, she limited access to the president to close family and doctors. She screened which issues and documents the president could entertain and liaised between him, his Cabinet and Congress. Not only the American people, but Wilson’s own administration, did not know the extent of the president’s condition.

Bolling Wilson’s bedside governing continued for about a year and a half, and she earned herself the title of “secret president.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was 39 years old when he contracted polio in 1921. Fresh off a vice presidential run, the news of his condition was widely publicized. The severity of it and the toll it took on his body was not.

FDR was paralyzed from the waist down, but only used a wheelchair in private, concerned that his disability would be perceived as weakness. There was an agreement between the White House and the press that the president would not be photographed in his chair. Because of that, very few photos of the president in a wheelchair exist.

During his terms, Roosevelt used aluminum and leather leg braces to create the illusion of walking. They were hidden under baggy, wide-legged trousers, and the president was often flanked by aides holding him steady.

A college football injury left John F. Kennedy with debilitating back pain for the rest of his life. The president underwent four surgeries before he took office, though none significantly relieved him of chronic pain. To manage that, Kennedy relied on opioids including codeine and methadone.

JFK privately used crutches around the White House and wore a stiff, corset-like back brace for most of his adult life. Toward the end of Kennedy’s life, a doctor put him on a strength-building regimen that improved his pain and helped him lessen his use of the brace.

But in 1963, Kennedy tweaked his back and decided to use the brace again on his trip to Dallas. He was wearing the brace on Nov. 22 when he was assassinated in Dealey Plaza.

Some doctors believe the brace contributed to his death by preventing his body from collapsing to the floor of the car he was riding in after Lee Harvey Oswald’s first shot hit him. The second shot that hit Kennedy in the head was fatal.

The 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan was front-page news. But details about the president’s condition — and how close he came to death — were kept hidden.

Reagan famously walked himself into the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital in D.C. and joked to surgeons: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”

Decades later, a book revealed the president had collapsed after that walk. His blood pressure had tanked. Reagan would go on to lose more than half his blood in the hospital as surgeons removed the bullet fired by would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. The shot had entered his chest, hit a rib and a lung, and lodged itself just an inch from his heart.

In 2024, just months before the presidential election, incumbent Joe Biden shocked the nation by dropping out of the race. He said it was in “the best interest” of the Democratic Party, but remained tight-lipped about mounting pressure he faced from his own party.

There had been widespread speculation about the president’s cognitive decline. A disastrous debate performance against then-candidate Donald Trump seemed to seal the president’s fate.

The following year, an explosive book reported on Biden’s mental state in detail. Sources close to the president said he would fail to recognize political allies and constantly lose his train of thought. The book also claimed that the Biden administration went to great lengths to cover up the true extent of his deteriorating memory.

On the possibility of a second Biden term, one anonymous aide told the book’s authors: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years. He’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”

Biden and his inner circle have denied the claims.