Loquacious, hirsute and eccentric, Dr. Bornstein, a gastroenterologist, was Mr. Trump’s personal physician from 1980 to 2017. He had inherited Mr. Trump as a patient from his father, Dr. Jacob Bornstein, with whom he shared a medical practice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at Park Avenue and 78th Street.
When Mr. Trump was elected president in 2016, Dr. Bornstein had hoped to be named White House physician and suggested as much to a longtime Trump assistant. But he was expelled from the Trump orbit after he disclosed to The New York Times that the president was taking medication to make his hair grow.
Dr. Bornstein came to public attention in December 2015, during his famous patient’s campaign for president.
Mr. Trump, a Republican, had been insinuating that Hillary Clinton, his likely Democratic opponent, did not have the stamina to serve as president. In response to questions about his own health, he ordered Dr. Bornstein to issue “a full medical report.” Mr. Trump predicted that although he would be 70 when he took office, the oldest president ever to be inaugurated for the first time, the report would show that the state of his health was “perfection.”
He soon released a four-paragraph letter signed by Dr. Bornstein saying that his blood pressure and unspecified lab test results were “astonishingly excellent,” and that his strength and stamina were “extraordinary.”
