Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark here in 2026. My first take,

glad to do it with Sunny Bunch. Hot takes. How you doing, man? You good? I'm good. Excited for the new

year of takes. It's going to be great. I forget. We calculated how many takes we did in 2025 is well over like a thousand. More than a thousand takes. I think we did more than a thousand. It was a thousand. It wasn't all of me. It felt like it was all in me, but it was not. So we're going to have to beat that record, I think, by 2026. For this one, we're going to be talking about Trump and his health. The reason we're talking about

Trump and his health is that there's this kind of really interesting article from the Wall Street

Journal that dives into his health way more extensively and comprehensively than we've had.

It was so interesting and it's so provocative that Trump felt the need to actually get on the

phone with the reporters to talk about it and insist that he's the picture of great health. My favorite thing, as you mentioned, he gets on the phone with him. And it's, it is like the old Twitter meme bit, please don't put it in the paper that I'm mad that you're asking about my health. Because that's, that's exact. It's like, I can't believe you're asking me about my health again. I'm so healthy. I do cognitive tests once a month. And I pass all of them. I pass all of them with flying colors. And like that there's like a second order question after that, which is like, why are you doing so many cognitive tests all the time? Why is this needed? I guess we'll jump ahead a little bit because you know, we'll get back to the journal story

in a little bit, but to your point, we're recording this. It's the Friday, January 2nd. This is going to come out tomorrow, though. But this morning, he went on true social, and I couldn't tell if he was saying this was a third cognitive test he got, but he, I think it might have been, but because he writes this, I'm going to read from. The word does doctors have just reported that I'm in perfect health and that I aced on caps, meaning was, he had to define ace, meaning was correct on 100% of the questions asked. For the third straight time, my cognitive examination, something which no other president or previous vice president was willing to take. P.S. I strongly believe that anyone running for president or vice president should be

mandatorily forced to take a strong, meaningful, and proven cognitive examination. Okay.

So he definitely took his third cognitive test. It's a lot. Why do you need to do three?

I don't know. I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to play a doctor on TV here.

But it is interesting that he keeps doing here. But it is interesting that he

keeps doing it. And it's interesting that he keeps getting annoyed at having to talk about doing it.

That is, that is, again, the thing that jumps out. Now, back to the Wall Street Journal piece,

it is interesting because, look, on the one hand, Donald Trump, oldest president ever to be

sworn out, right? He's five months older than Biden was.

And, and, okay, fine, old, very old.

He's five months older than when he was inaugurated. He was five months older than when

Biden was inaugurated.

Yes, right. He's old. He's an old president. He is an old man. And that comes with certain things. I will say, look, he does the live question and answer sessions with reporters that Biden avoided for a long time, right? That he was he was trying not to do. I will say he sounds basically the same as usual often in those. He's a little bit raspier this time around.

He's certainly a little bit mumbly, but he is still, at least he's doing these. I don't think he is

demented precisely or anything like that, but he definitely seems to be, he seems to be slowing down a

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