Gavin Newsom trolls Trump’s ‘perfect’ MRI results with a savage satirical press release
If laughter is indeed the best medicine, the California Governor’s office has just prescribed a heavy dose at the President’s expense. In the high-stakes theatre of American politics, few rivalries have become as personally barbed — or as digitally petty — as the one between California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump.
This feud took a turn for the absurd this week when Newsom’s team weaponised a medical report to dismantle Trump’s claims of physical perfection, proving that in 2025, political warfare is waged as much through memes and mock press releases as it is through policy.
The latest salvo was fired shortly after the White House released a memorandum regarding President Trump’s recent medical screenings. Seizing the opportunity, Gavin Newsom and his press office circulated a satirical health assessment of their own, attributed to the illustrious ‘Dr. Dolittle’.
The choice of physician — a fictional character from Hugh Lofting’s children’s books who can converse with animals — set the tone for a document that was less a medical record and more a roast.
According to this facetious release, the Governor is not merely fit; he is arguably a biological miracle. The statement describes Newsom as the ‘healthiest human currently alive or recorded in medical history’.
It goes on to make fantastical claims that mock the hyperbolic language Trump often uses to describe his own vitality. For instance, the report likens Newsom’s bone density to that of a ‘redwood’ tree and suggests his heart rate is so calm it appears as if he is ‘meditating or just naturally enlightened’. The press release even boasted that his cardiovascular scans were the ‘best we’ve ever seen’.
This comedic hyperbolic style directly mirrors the President’s tendency to embellish his own cognitive and physical exam results. By adopting the same bombastic tone, Gavin Newsom effectively highlights the absurdity of the original White House claims without needing to issue a formal rebuttal.
The mock report did not stop at praising the Governor’s fictional physiology; it pivoted to a sharp critique of President Trump’s behaviour during his first year back in the Oval Office. The release noted that, unlike his Republican counterpart, Governor Newsom manages to complete full workdays without ‘falling asleep in meetings’. It further clarified that the Californian leader does not require ‘executive time’ — a term famously associated with Trump’s unstructured blocks of day used for watching television and tweeting.
Perhaps the most biting visual jab was the assurance that Newsom is ‘able to stand upright without looking like the leaning Tower of Pisa’. This references the widespread online speculation regarding the President’s posture during public addresses.
‘While we do not typically comment on the health of other elected officials’, the office wrote with feigned diplomacy, ‘we are aware of a letter released today from the White House claiming that President Trump is in excellent health’. This satirical masterpiece was a direct response to a genuine, albeit confusing, medical disclosure from the White House.
On Monday, a memo from the President’s physician, Sean Barbabella, revealed that Trump had undergone an MRI in October. Barbabella stated the exam included ‘advanced imaging’ deemed ‘standard for an executive physical’ for a man of Trump’s age, concluding that the cardiovascular and abdominal results were ‘perfectly normal’.
However, the president himself muddied the waters regarding the procedure. During an exchange with reporters while travelling from Florida to Washington, Trump admitted he had ‘no idea’ which part of his body was scanned. ‘It was just an MRI’, he insisted. ‘What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it’.
The confusion surrounding why a ‘preventative’ MRI was ordered — and the patient’s lack of knowledge regarding his own procedure — provided the perfect opening for Gavin Newsom to strike. While doctors note that preventative cardiac and abdominal MRIs are not standard routine screening recommendations, the political diagnosis is clear: the trolling from California is chronic, and there appears to be no cure in sight.
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