Bruising on Trump’s left hand sparks renewed questions about his health

U.S. President Donald Trump participates in Santa tracker phone calls on Christmas Eve from the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 24, 2025. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

New bruising on U.S. president Donald Trump’s left hand is reviving questions about his health nearly one year after he became the oldest president to take the oath of office.

Across a series of events last week, the 79-year-old Trump appeared with discoloration or light bruising on the back of his left hand, in addition to the more persistent bruise on his right hand that has been visible for months.

The new bruise appears to complicate the White House’s explanation that the right-handed Trump developed the bruising through constant handshaking along with a regular regimen of aspirin that can make such discoloration more common.

And while medical experts told CNN there is no fresh cause for concern, calling it a likely benign condition common in older people, they warned that Trump’s reluctance to be more transparent about his health only threatens to intensify the scrutiny that he’s struggled all year to escape.

“They’re just feeding the curiosity cycle,” said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “He’s in the public eye, he has a certain image he wants to portray, and even these minor things detract from that image.”

The fresh bruising on Trump’s left hand represents the latest development to fuel speculation about his health since he returned to the White House — a sensitive topic for him that he’s sought to counter by boasting frequently about his vigor.

Trump won last year in part by fanning voter concerns about former President Joe Biden’s age and mental and physical fitness for office. Trump has continued to use Biden, 83, as a rhetorical foil and rejected any comparisons with the former president despite their closeness in age, often disparaging his predecessor’s frailty and punctuating his own public events by asking, “Do you think Biden could do that?”

Yet while Trump has maintained a far more active public schedule, he’s nevertheless been hounded at times by his own set of health questions. After photos over the summer showed swelling in his legs, the White House announced in July that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency — a common condition frequently found in older people.

Asked this week about the bruising on Trump’s left hand, the White House declined to issue any new explanation.

“President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

Several medical experts who reviewed photos of Trump’s left hand told CNN that the discoloration wasn’t likely the result of handshaking — given Trump is right-handed — but that his age and aspirin regimen meant there could be some similar explanation.

“Bruising can be just simply a one-off thing when you have some trauma, you bump into something,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and who was a longtime cardiologist for former Vice President Dick Cheney. “Aspirin will make you more prone to bleeding.”

Reiner, who cautioned he has not personally examined Trump, added that he frequently sees similar bruising in patients who take stronger blood-thinner medications than aspirin, raising questions about whether Trump has disclosed all of the medicines he’s on.

Such medications are common and not an indication of any bigger health concern, he said, pointing to Biden’s disclosure of his use of the blood thinner Eliquis while in office.

“The question now is less medical than it is transparency,” Reiner said.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s medications and whether he has fully disclosed them all, instead criticizing the scrutiny over his health.

“Any so-called medical professionals engaging in armchair diagnosis or false speculation for political purposes are clearly breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’ve sworn to, and they should get their head examined,” communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement.

From bruising to snoozing, a year of heightened scrutiny

Trump has long had bruising on his right hand, which CNN has reported predated his return to the White House. But it drew more attention after he began trying to cover it with heavy makeup and bandages and shield it from cameras with his other hand — moves that only heightened suspicions.

The White House addressed the right-hand bruising at the same time as the announcement of his chronic venous insufficiency diagnosis. A letter released from his doctor at the time said, “President Trump remains in excellent health.”

In October, Trump returned to Walter Reed after his April physical for an abrupt second visit, which the White House labeled a “routine” checkup, before the president later revealed he received an MRI. The vague disclosure — Trump initially said it was “perfect” but also told reporters he didn’t know which part of his body was imaged — and the administration’s reluctance to offer more specifics spurred a flurry of concern over why his doctors had ordered the scan.

Weeks later, Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, said in a memo that Trump’s medical imaging was of his cardiovascular and abdominal systems and that both showed “perfectly normal” results. It added that the “advanced imaging was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.”

Reiner told CNN at the time that Trump’s medical screening was not standard procedure. “This, obviously, was performed in response to some clinical concern,” he said. The reason for the screening is “probably not so nefarious,” he added, but suggested it’d be better for the administration to be more forthcoming to avoid that speculation.

Inside the White House, officials have bristled at the demands for more disclosure, viewing those questions primarily as politically motivated and aimed at sowing doubts about Trump’s vitality.

After the president appeared to briefly nod off during an Oval Office event last month, the White House denied that he’d fallen asleep and decried it as “a garbage narrative.” A New York Times report days later examining Trump’s health and daily schedule provoked the personal ire of the president, who called it a “hit piece” in a social media post. But during a Cabinet meeting earlier this month, Trump again spent an hour appearing to doze off. (The White House pushed back, saying that Trump had been “listening attentively and running the entire three-hour marathon Cabinet meeting.”)

Now, the photos of Trump’s left hand — which have already circulated for days on social media — are adding to what voters see as they watch a second-term president on the verge of turning 80.

Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, warned that while all administrations face pressure to be transparent about the president’s health, Trump’s insistence on projecting an image of unfaltering vitality means even the smallest displays of vulnerability are likely to attract intense scrutiny.

“The president is not young,” he said. “And when things are oversold and then there’s a perceived deficiency, its importance is magnified.”