The shaggy-haired, bespectacled gastroenterologist first got here to public prominence in 2015, when he authored a notice for the Trump marketing campaign memorably predicting his affected person “would be the healthiest particular person elected to the presidency.”
In sharing the physician’s report, then-candidate Trump mistakenly attributed it to Dr. Jacob Bornstein — Harold’s father, who had handled Trump till 1980. It was then that Harold took over Trump’s care.
Following Trump’s upset victory within the 2016 White Home race, nonetheless, the doctor-patient relationship between the 2 males appeared to deteriorate.
A month after the election, Bornstein appeared comparatively unfazed by the prospect of the brand new president — who, at 70, would develop into the oldest individual to ever assume the workplace — dying on the job.
“If one thing occurs to him, then it occurs to him,” he advised Stat Information on the time. “It’s like all the remainder of us, no? That’s why we’ve a vp and a speaker of the Home and a complete line of individuals. They will simply preserve dying.”
Tensions escalated additional in 2018, when Bornstein accused Keith Schiller — the previous White Home director of Oval Workplace operations and Trump’s longtime private bodyguard — of conducting a “raid” of his workplace the earlier yr to acquire the president’s medical information.
Bornstein advised NBC Information that the scary episode, which he alleged lasted roughly half an hour, “created a number of chaos” and left him feeling “raped, frightened and unhappy.”
Then-White Home press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders argued that White Home staffers have been merely following “normal working process” once they seized the paperwork.
And though Sanders advised reporters that Bornstein’s description of a “raid” was inaccurate, she didn’t contradict his account.
The identical day as that press briefing by Sanders, Bornstein confessed in an interview that it was really then-candidate Trump who wrote his hyperbolic physician’s report in 2015.
“He dictated that complete letter. I didn’t write that letter,” Bornstein advised CNN. “I simply made it up as I went alongside.”
