CNN host Jake Tapper isn’t buying the official White House explanation for President Donald Trump sporting bandages on the back of his hand, arguing on “The Lead” that there’s more to the president’s health picture than has been revealed.
Tapper discussed the matter with CNN chief political analyst David Axelrod and ex-Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that Trump wears the bandages as a result of “constantly shaking hands.”
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“The White House gave the same explanation for bruising back in July,” Tapper said Thursday. “Obviously, he’s 79 years old. And there is something going on with his health that they’re not telling us, because otherwise, why did he have that MRI?”
Trump visited the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, in October for his second “yearly” check-up in six months, later boasting to reporters that the results were “outstanding” — before claiming that he actually has “no idea what they analyzed.”
Axelrod noted that this lack of transparency from the administration is “a common theme.”
“A lot of extraordinary things have happened when the president of the United States has an MRI and can’t remember or name what part of the body the MRI was about,” he told Tapper. “There are questions, there are issues here.”
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“And the question is whether the American people deserve to know,” he continued. “They were raised relative to [former President Joe] Biden, [and] they should be raised now, because clearly something’s going on.”
Tapper reminded his guests that Trump is an open germaphobe who has publicly admitted that he doesn’t like shaking hands and asked them how much confidence they have in the official hand-shaking explanation about his bandages.