Harold Bornstein, Donald Trump’s zany and long-serving personal physician – obituary

Harold Bornstein, Donald Trump’s former personal physician, who has died aged 73, hit the headlines in 2015 when he issued a letter claiming that the 70-year-old, overweight, junk-food eating would-be Republican candidate would “unequivocally” be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Trump had been insinuating that Hillary Clinton, his putative Democratic opponent, did not have the stamina for the presidency, and when questioned about his own health ordered Bornstein to issue “a full medical report’’, predicting that “it will show perfection.”

Bornstein’s letter, a scrappy four paragraphs, went on to claim that Trump’s “laboratory results were astonishingly excellent”, but surprise was expressed in some quarters at the language used, one pundit calling it “the single most absurd letter ever written by a doctor in the history of the practice of medicine on earth”. Cynical hacks even detected the hand of the Tweetmeister himself.

At first Bornstein, a curious figure with shoulder-length hair and round glasses, insisted that it was all his own work, explaining that it had been written in a hurry while a Trump limousine waited outside his consulting rooms. “I get rushed, and I get anxious when I get rushed,” he said, admitting that he might have “picked up [Trump’s] kind of language …”

Bornstein had hoped to accompany his patient into the White House but it was not to be, and Bornstein later complained that he had been given poor seats for the president’s inauguration.

The snub seems to have persuaded him to open up about the president’s medical history, and when, in January 2017, he revealed that Trump took Propecia, a drug to stimulate hair growth, he was expelled from the Trump circle, one of Trump’s assistants allegedly phoning him to say: “So you wanted to be the White House doctor? Forget it, you’re out.”

Two days later three White House heavies showed up at his office to collect Trump’s medical records, a visit (or “raid” according to Bornstein) that left him feeling “raped, frightened and sad”. White House sources claimed it was standard operating procedure. The intruders also told Bornstein to remove a picture on the wall of him with Trump.

Then in 2018 he finally admitted in an interview that he had not written the famous letter giving Trump a clean bill of health after all. “He [Trump] dictated that whole letter,” he said.

Harold Nelson Bornstein was born on March 3 1947 in New York to Jacob Bornstein, a doctor, and Maida (néeSeltzer). He followed his father into medicine, graduating from Tufts University in 1975 and specialising in gastroenterology.

A hippyish figure (he was proud of “refusing to have the conservative beard and haircut that my parents thought was necessary for success”), Bornstein wrote poetry under the nom de plume Count Harold.

An ode on a wrestling match contained the lines: “Linda screamed and Gilby moaned/ Peter sighed and Jackie groaned as/ Buddy Wolfe blew out his cork/on the ‘Golden Boy’ from White Plains, New York”.

His father had lived close to Trump’s childhood home and became his personal doctor. Bornstein joined his father’s Upper East Side practice and inherited his most famous patient in 1980.

He had several other members of the Trump family on his books, once boasting: “I am probably the only person in the world who has every phone number for him and all the wives.” He liked Trump, he said, “because I think he likes me”.

His 2015 letter, however, made Bornstein, whose business cards bore the legend “dottore molto famoso” (“very famous doctor”, the butt of satirists, with Jim Carrey, the actor, tweeting a cartoon of Bornstein as a “Hippocratic oaf”.

Bornstein is survived by his third wife, Melissa, and by four sons and a daughter.

Harold Bornstein, born March 3 1947, died January 8 2021