President Donald Trump’s swollen ankles have made an appearance for the first time in weeks during his high-stakes summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, prompting renewed questions about his health.
After greeting Putin in Alaska on Friday and giving him the red carpet treatment, the two leaders sat down for their first face-to-face meeting in years, as the American president sought to find an end to the war in Ukraine.
But photos taken at the summit showed Trump’s ankles looking somewhat enlarged again, weeks after the White House revealed he had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency.
CVI is a common condition in people over the age of 70, in which the veins of a person’s body have trouble returning blood to the heart.
While the condition isn’t life-threatening, doctors say it gets riskier with age and can be exacerbated by a poor diet.
Trump’s health was subject to scrutiny in the days leading up to the summit, with reporters asking White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt for an update earlier this week.
“Look, you see the president every day,” she told reporters Tuesday. “He’s moving, he’s working, he’s continuing, there have been no adjustments made to his lifestyle.”
But on Friday, a spokeswoman declined to answer questions about the president’s health in view of the latest images, other than to refer the Daily Beast to Leavitt’s earlier comments.
The White House was also non-committal when CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe asked on Tuesday if Trump’s White House physician Sean Barbabella could be made available to answer questions about the president’s health.
Similar requests have previously been made by the Daily Beast, but the White House did not oblige, and efforts to reach Barbabella’s office directly were also unanswered.
“I don’t want to make that commitment on behalf of the physician,” Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday.
“It’s certainly something we can look into and explore out of the effort of transparency, because unlike the previous White House, there is nothing to hide.”
Friday’s summit was a critical juncture for Trump, who came to office promising to end the war in Ukraine “on day one” of his presidency.
Since then, however, his patience with Putin has been wearing thin as the Russian authoritarian continued to drag his heels on a ceasefire.
“We get a lot of bulls--t thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said in June. “He’s very nice all the time but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Despite the president’s earlier concerns, the pair met for three hours in Alaska on Friday afternoon in the hope of a breakthrough.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff also joined Trump for the meeting, while Putin was accompanied by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov.
However, it is still not clear what exactly the meeting achieved in terms of a peace deal, given Putin’s obsession with claiming Ukraine as his own and his ongoing reluctance to negotiate for a ceasefire.
