Trump's explanation for bruising on hands fuels more questions

U.S. President Donald Trump, wearing band-aids on his hand, attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 2, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

President Donald Trump repeatedly insists that his health, both physical and mental, is first-rate. But his niece, psychologist/author Mary Trump, often points to behavior that, she says, shows poor mental health. And recurring bruising on Trump's hands, CNN's Adam Cancryn reports, continues to raise questions about the president's physical health.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claims that the bruising occurs because Trump is shaking hands with a lot of people. But according to Cancryn, medical experts are questioning that explanation.

"Across a series of events last week," Cancryn explains in an article published on December 31, "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."

Cancryn continues, "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…. 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."

Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in the Chicago area, told CNN that Trump and his allies are "feeding the curiosity cycle" where the bruises are concerned.

Linder notes, "He's in the public eye; he has a certain image he wants to portray, and even these minor things detract from that image."

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who was a cardiologist for the late Vice President Dick Cheney and is now a professor of medicine at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., points out that bruising on an older person's hands isn't necessarily symptomatic of a severe health problem.

Reiner told CNN, "Bruising can be just simply a one-off thing when you have some trauma, you bump into something. Aspirin will make you more prone to bleeding…. The question now is less medical than it is transparency."

Read Adam Cancryn's full article for CNN at this link.

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