President Donald Trump has been pictured with a large bruise on his left hand while delivering a speech about his “Gaza board of peace” in Davos, Switzerland.
Trump sustained the bruise Thursday during a signing ceremony for the peace board at the World Economic Forum after the president “hit his hand on the corner of the signing table,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to The Independent.
A White House official added that Trump, 79, and his physicians have previously noted he is susceptible to hand bruising due to his daily aspirin routine.
Pictures taken at the conference yesterday and this morning, before the peace board signing, showed no bruising, but the markings were prominent in later photos.
Trump often applies heavy makeup to cover bruising on his hands, which the White House previously explained is due to the president meeting “more Americans and shak[ing] their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history.”
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He addressed his health in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal and acknowledged that he applies makeup to his hands for when he gets “whacked again by someone.”
“I have makeup that’s, you know, easy to put on, takes about 10 seconds,” he said.
The president also told the outlet that he takes 325 milligrams of aspirin a day – much higher than the more common, daily low dose of 81 milligrams – and had done so for years.
“I’m a little superstitious,” Trump said. “They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?”
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist who treated the late vice president Dick Cheney, explained that anticoagulants do not actually thin blood. “So that makes no sense, that actually makes nonsense,” he said on CNN.
“It’s not like changing something from gumbo to chicken soup, it doesn’t make it doesn’t make it thinner. It makes you less likely to clot,” he added.
Trump is the oldest person to assume the presidency, a job that’s constant and has countless stressors. But the president’s doctor, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, said that he is in “exceptional health and perfectly suited to execute his duties as Commander in Chief.”
Eric Garcia contributed to this report
