Claim:
In December 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan on his brain “found nothing.”
Rating:
Context
Trump did have an MRI scan in October 2025, but it was reportedly on his cardiovascular system and abdominal area, not his brain.
In December 2025, a rumor that U.S. President Donald Trump announced an MRI scan of his brain “found nothing” circulated online (archived):
WASHINGTON—Boasting about his cognitive health, on Monday Donald J. Trump asserted than an MRI performed on his brain found nothing.
“I had a perfect MRI,” he told reporters. “The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty.”
Trump said there was no point in releasing his MRI because “there’s nothing to see,” adding, “It’s like the East Wing.”
The claim appeared amid increasing calls for Trump to release the results of an MRI he underwent in October 2025. The White House released a memo Dec. 1 that said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging was “perfectly normal,” according to his doctor, Sean Barbabella. When a reporter asked Trump on Dec. 1 what part of the body the MRI was looking at, he said, “I have no idea … it wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.”
Variations of the rumor that Trump said an MRI scan of his brain “found nothing” spread on Reddit (archived), Facebook and TikTok (archived), and Snopes readers asked about the authenticity of the claim.
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events. However, there was no evidence Trump announced an MRI scan on his brain “found nothing.”
Rather, the rumor originated with The Borowitz Report (archived) — a site that describes its output as satirical in nature. Its author, Andy Borowitz, wrote on its About page: “I’ve been writing satirical news since I was eighteen. This represents either commitment to a genre or arrested development.”
The New Yorker featured The Borowitz Report as a column for 25 years. Borowitz announced in 2023 that the magazine dropped his column for financial reasons. He then returned to publishing his satirical stories on his own website and social media pages.
If a U.S. president had actually publicly made this statement about an MRI, major news media outlets would have reported it. However, a Google search of the keywords “Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing” generated results related only to the satirical story in question.
(Google.com)
Snopes has addressed similar satirical claims stemming from The Borowitz Report in the past, including the assertion that the U.S. Navy struck Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ yacht near Venezuela and a rumor that billionaire George Soros filed for bankruptcy after funding “No Kings” protests.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.
Sources
Boada, Axel. ‘Video: President Trump Says He Will Release His M.R.I. Results’. The New York Times, 1 Dec. 2025. U.S. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000010556754/trump-mri-test-results.html.
Borowitz, Andy. Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing. https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/trump-claims-mri-on-his-brain-found. Accessed 2 Dec. 2025.
‘Doctor Says Trump Had Preventative Screening MRI on Heart, Abdomen with “perfectly Normal” Results’. AP News, 30 Nov. 2025, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-mri-physical-white-house-0c66f2f9fca865d842ee94329a210a42.
MSN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/general/trump-vows-to-release-perfect-mri-results-after-gov-walz-questions-his-health/ar-AA1RrYEj. Accessed 2 Dec. 2025.
