Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that his former White House doctor once declared him healthier than Obama, then took it further by bringing golf and lettuce into the conversation.
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Trump made the remarks at a rally at the Port of Corpus Christi in Texas, one of his final campaign stops a week before the November 3 midterm elections. While talking up his push to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, he spotted Rep. Ronny Jackson in the crowd and stopped to praise him.
“I would say that’s about as good as a gulf is gonna get, Doc,” Trump said, calling him “the great Doc. Ronny” and claiming Jackson became an admiral “because he was so good” before winning a seat in Congress. “And I loved him.”
Then came a story Trump has been telling for years. According to Trump, reporters once asked Jackson which president was the healthiest. “He presided over the lives of Barack Hussein Obama and Bush and Trump, and they asked him, ‘Who’s the healthiest of the three?'” Trump said. “He said, ‘Without question, the healthiest is President Donald J. Trump.'”
Trump said Jackson also called him “a much better golfer,” the one part of the compliment he said he would agree with. From there he turned to Obama’s eating habits, claiming “every piece of lettuce he eats has to be perfect” before adding, “I’m not that choosy.”
Here is what the record shows. Jackson served as physician to the president from 2013 to 2018, covering part of Obama’s second term and the start of Trump’s first. He worked in the White House Medical Unit during the George W. Bush years but was never Bush’s personal physician. There is also no public record of Jackson ever saying Trump was healthier than Obama. Newsweek searched for one after Trump told the story at his Florida club in November 2024 and came up empty.
The closest Jackson came was a January 2018 press briefing after Trump’s first physical as president, where he praised Trump’s “incredibly good genes” and said he might live to 200 with a better diet. Trump has since turned that moment into a head to head win over Obama.
He has told versions of it at an Iowa campaign rally in December 2023 and at the White House Hanukkah reception in December 2025. At the Hanukkah event, he added a telling line about Jackson: “If he didn’t say that I would have never talked to him again.”
The healthier than Obama question came up again in January, when New York Magazine sat down with Trump and two of his White House physicians. When one of them, a doctor who also treated Obama, was asked who was healthier, Trump stared at him across the desk before he answered, “President Trump.” Trump’s response was “Write that.” In the same feature, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said of Trump’s diet, “I don’t know how he’s alive.”
The numbers from their White House physicals favor Obama. Obama’s body mass index, a rough measure of body fat based on height and weight, came in at 22.8, well within the healthy range. Trump’s was 29.9, one tenth of a point below the line for obesity. Obama, known for playing pickup basketball while in office, is 65. Trump turned 80 in June and was the oldest person ever sworn in as president.
Jackson’s own title is complicated too. Trump keeps calling him an admiral, but the Navy demoted Jackson from rear admiral following a Pentagon inspector general investigation into his conduct as White House physician, a move that became public in 2024. Jackson is now on the ballot for reelection in Texas.
The rally also landed in the middle of a fresh feud between the two men. Over the weekend, Obama, campaigning for Democrats in Ohio, compared Trump’s White House renovations to a Cheesecake Factory. Trump fired back by saying the White House was in bad shape when he took over from Obama. On Tuesday, he moved the fight from the decor to the dinner plate.
