There’s No Such Thing as a Preventative MRI — but There’s Definitely Such a Thing as Political Bullshit

Since 2005, I’ve had at least one MRI every single year of my adult life. I know MRIs the way other people know Spotify playlists or the McDonald’s menu.

Illustration by Riley Levine

I’ve heard a lot of nonsense in politics over the years, but every once in a while a phrase pops out of someone’s mouth that is so cosmically stupid, so profoundly unserious, and so deeply disrespectful to actual lived experience that it reaches a new stratosphere of bullshit.

Donald Trump’s recent claim that he got a “preventative MRI” is one of those phrases. It’s the kind of thing that sounds like it came from a man who wandered into a hospital, misheard two nurses talking, and sprinted out yelling, “See? I’m healthier than everyone!” MRIs are not preventative. MRIs are not routine. MRIs are not something you put on your 2025 vision board next to “read more books” and “drink more water.” MRIs are diagnostic instruments designed to tell you whether something in your body is about to change your life. So when I hear the president toss out “preventative MRI” as if it’s a seasonal flu shot or a Groupon, I don’t just roll my eyes. I get offended on behalf of every single person who’s ever had to lie in that tube wondering whether their life is about to split into “before” and “after.”

Let me establish something up front: I am not a medical doctor. I don’t treat patients. I don’t prescribe medications. I don’t diagnose anything outside of the shit-show that is American political behavior. But technically — I mean, if we’re splitting hairs — I am a doctor. I’m the kind of doctor who assigns APA papers, teaches constitutional law at 9 a.m., and lives off energy drinks and the occasional caffeine pill like a man who has made several poor life choices in a row. Anyone who clowned Jesse Spano for melting down over caffeine pills has clearly never taken one as an adult with grading to finish—every time I swallow one, I question my entire existence. Elizabeth Berkley, you are owed an Emmy in my opinion. But I digress. I’m the kind of doctor parents brag about until someone starts coughing. I can’t tell you whether your blood pressure is high, but I can absolutely tell you why your senator is. And while I’m not a medical professional, I am absolutely fluent in political bullshit. Trump saying he got a “preventative MRI” is bullshit at the doctoral level. If bullshit were an Olympic sport, Trump would be the Simone Biles of dishonesty—flipping, twisting, sticking the landing every time, and somehow convincing almost half the country gravity doesn’t apply to him.

But here’s why this particular lie hits differently for me: since 2005, I’ve had at least one MRI every single year of my adult life, sometimes two, sometimes more. I know MRIs the way other people know Spotify playlists or the McDonald’s menu. I’ve had MRIs of my brain, my spine, my legs — if a body part can legally fit inside that tube, I’ve had it scanned. And not once, not a single time in twenty years, has a doctor ever said, “We’re doing this to prevent something.” It’s always: “We need to check something.” Or: “We’re not sure what’s going on.” Or: “We have to make sure this hasn’t gotten worse.” If you want to say “preventative MRI,” fine — let’s all pretend we live in a world where vocabulary has no rules and people invent terms like they’re building IKEA furniture without instructions. Let’s just say it for shits and giggles. But even in that imaginary world, the only thing an MRI “prevents” is your disease silently cooking up new ways to ruin your week.

My history with MRIs goes all the way back to 2003 when I was in Army ROTC at the University of Tennessee. When I first joined, I was out of shape. But ROTC instructors don’t care — they will whip you into shape whether you like it or not. Within months, I could do pushups, pull-ups, squats, swim laps — stuff I never thought I’d be good at. The only thing I could never get right was running. Some mornings I could run six miles with the other cadets like it was nothing. Other mornings I couldn’t get past the first mile before my legs suddenly said, “Nah, we’re clocking out.” After one particular run, I cramped so hard I could barely walk. I wasn’t sick enough to go to the hospital, but they sent me to one of the medical officers. The next day my instructor pulled me aside and said, “Ealy, you got a lot of heart, but this is just not something you can do right now.” And let me tell you, nothing will humble a 22-year-old faster than hearing, “Your spirit is willing, but your body is staging a quiet rebellion.”

I was heartbroken. ROTC was supposed to be my path forward after multiple semesters of slacking off. Without it, I had no plan. So I left Tennessee, moved to Virginia to stay with my uncle, and drifted around the DMV for a while trying to figure out life. Eventually I moved back to Los Angeles to live with my cousin Cherrae in 2005. By then, I had lost the depression weight I’d packed on and looked like a young, healthy 24-year-old man with nothing particularly wrong with me. Except there was something wrong. Whenever Cherrae and I would leave a restaurant or walk to the car, there were random moments when my legs would just … stop. Go numb. Lock up. And I still didn’t get it checked out, because I was young enough to assume nothing bad could ever be happening to me.

Then one night at 3 a.m., I got a fever so intense I couldn’t move my body at all. I called my mom, panicked. She said, “Call 911 right now.” At Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, they ran tests, checked reflexes, did all the things. The next morning, the neurologist — the late great Mihiko Nelsen — told me I needed an MRI. I had no idea what an MRI really was. I thought it was some fancy X-ray. I didn’t know that tube was about to become a recurring character in the next twenty years of my life, like a clingy ex who refuses to stop showing up at your house uninvited.

Let me pause here to explain something about MRIs: there is nothing routine about them. They are loud, claustrophobic, and uncomfortably intimate. You lie on a narrow table, slide into a tube that looks like something NASA abandoned in the ’80s, and for the next 30 to 60 minutes you listen to sounds that can only be described as a robot having a nervous breakdown. Some people panic inside. Some people need to be sedated. Some people pee themselves — yes, that happens. The tech always tells you, “Just relax,” which is hilarious advice when you’re stuck inside a magnet thinking about every medical mystery in the universe. I have never met a single person who enjoys getting an MRI. Not one. People only get MRIs because a doctor thinks something might be seriously wrong.

And in my case, something was. After that first MRI in 2005, they diagnosed me with multiple sclerosis. Not a death sentence, but definitely a life sentence. You hear those words and immediately know your old definition of “normal” is about to be discontinued.

But I was young and stubborn, and I refused to let MS define me. I moved to L.A., took acting classes, dated, partied — did all the things a 24-year-old is supposed to do. Over the years since my diagnosis I had four girlfriends: two were kind of serious, one was very serious, and the fourth became my wife. The funny thing about dating with MS is that sometimes the MRI scared women more than the disease. A disease can be abstract. But an MRI? That sounds like you’re being inspected for alien abduction. And because they were women — especially Black women — they did what Black women do better than the FBI: they Googled everything. They’d come back like, “Kristoffer … why are you going in that machine every year? Are you gonna die?” And I’d be like, “Nah, the machine isn’t the problem. It’s the thing the machine is looking for.”

In 2010, someone I was with — someone whose opinion carried more weight with me than I admitted at the time — told me point-blank that I needed to stop pretending this wasn’t serious. It wasn’t just a casual comment; it was one of those moments where someone who cares about you more than you realize holds up a mirror you weren’t ready to look into. I brushed her off at first, but then I talked to my grandmother. She told me, “Whatever happens to you, your partner has to carry that weight, too.” And that landed with a different kind of force. So I finally started taking my neurologist’s advice seriously. I exercised. Ate better. Took my meds. Did everything by the book. My MRIs stayed consistent. Life stabilized. I finished a master’s degree, got into USC Annenberg, built a career. And for a long time, I was able to live as someone who could hide what was wrong with me — until it reached a point where hiding it wasn’t an option anymore.

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Then in 2022, everything came crashing down. One morning I sat on the ground to put on my socks, and suddenly I couldn’t get up. My body just wouldn’t cooperate. My wife and I assumed it was an MS relapse, but my wife doesn’t play around with medical stuff — she called an ambulance before I even finished saying, “Maybe it’ll pass.” At the hospital, my neurologist, Dr. Girard, tried to tell me it was probably my “conditioning.” I looked at him like, “Sir, I have done EVERYTHING you have told me for ten years.” He paused, realized I wasn’t playing, and said, “Let’s run an MRI to be safe.” And all I could think was, “FUCK. I just had one six months ago.” But I went anyway.

The next morning, a brain surgeon walks in, asks me a couple of weirdly specific questions, and leaves. That’s when you know shit is bad. An hour later, Dr. Girard comes in and says, “This MRI looks way different from your usual ones. Have you fallen and hit your head in the last couple of years?” I told him yes. He took a breath and said, “Well … you have a subdural hematoma.” For anyone who doesn’t speak neurologist, that’s a slow, lingering brain bleed — the kind that just sits there building pressure like a toxic coworker waiting to cause a scene. “And we think this explains the drastic change in your balance.” My immediate response — which I said out loud, in front of medical professionals who definitely did not need the soundtrack — was, “What the fuck?”

And then it gets more surreal. The brain surgeon comes back in with the kind of calm confidence only a man who regularly opens skulls for a living can have, and he says, “Don’t worry, it’s a simple surgery. We’ll fix it. Your balance should come back.” So I’m thinking we’re talking about something I can pencil in, like a dentist appointment. I said, “Cool, I’ll call my wife and schedule it for next week.” And he looked at me the way a math teacher looks at a student who just proudly announced that two plus two is seven. He said, “No, you need it today.” I said, “Hold up — you just told me it wasn’t a big deal.” And he goes, “It isn’t … as long as we do it in the next few hours.” So now I’m like, “Okay, what happens if I don’t get it in the next few hours?” And without blinking, without flinching, without changing his tone at all, he says, “Well … you can bleed out and die.” I launched into an expletive-filled rant so intense I’m surprised a chaplain didn’t wander in with holy water. He waited patiently — brain surgeons must hear wild shit all the time — and then he started to say, “Well, if you don’t want to get it done, you can —” and before he could finish that sentence, I cut him off and said, “Nope. Let’s do it. I like being on the living side of things.”

And as if the day wasn’t already surreal enough, the hospital TV was on in the background while I was waiting to be wheeled into surgery, and the news came across that Bob Saget had died. I remember feeling genuinely sad for him and his family — this was someone whose work I’d grown up watching. But when they reported that he died from the same kind of head trauma I was literally being treated for, it stopped me cold.

“Okay … this is real. The universe is not playing around today.”

The surgery lasted almost four hours. I woke up with a shaved head full of staples and was sent home the next day, because hospitals love to discharge you the moment you can pronounce your own name. At first, I was healing exactly the way the doctors promised. My balance was improving. I thought I was on my way back to normal. But brain surgery recovery is not linear. You can feel great on Tuesday and like you got clipped by a Ford F-150 on Wednesday. Healing takes detours. Your brain rewires itself on a timeline it keeps secret from you. These days I see a neuropsychologist who helps track the cognitive fallout — a whole separate saga I’ll probably save for the autobiography in a few years. (And to my literary agent: if you’re reading this, please tell a top publisher this chapter alone is a guaranteed New York Times bestseller. Don’t be shy. Sell the dream.) What I can say, though, is that my balance hasn’t quite returned to its regularly scheduled programming just yet. And somewhere in all this, I still think I owe the brain surgeon about six hundred bucks. After reading this, my wife is probably going to sneak into my wallet and pay him when I’m not looking — and honestly, he did save my life, so I guess I won’t complain when she does it.

Let’s talk about the psychology behind this “Preventative MRI” mumbo-jumbo. Because it’s shameful, yes, but it’s also predictable. Everything Trump does is about image management. He must appear invincible. He cannot admit weakness. He cannot acknowledge aging or mortality. So when something concerning happens, he reframes it as strength. “Preventative MRI” is classic authoritarian language — vague, self-flattering, and designed to obscure rather than clarify. It’s gaslighting disguised as medical terminology, and not even good gaslighting. Good gaslighting at least makes you pause and think, “Huh… maybe I did imagine that.” Trump’s version is the bargain-bin variety where you’re like, “Sir, I watched you say it. The video has subtitles.” It’s projection too: he routinely questions other people’s health while refusing to give an honest account of his own. And it’s obedience optics: in a cult of personality, the leader must always be physically superior to the followers. Even his organs must be loyal.

I am not a medical expert. I don’t know Donald Trump’s medical history. But I know gaslighting. I know projection. I know fear of vulnerability. I know the psychology of authoritarian leaders who must distort reality to maintain dominance. And while I’m no MRI expert, I am an expert at getting MRIs — twenty years in the tube qualifies me better than whatever intern came up with “preventative MRI” on a lunch break.

My MRIs are routine only in the sense that paying taxes is routine — not because it’s enjoyable, but because if you don’t do it, something catastrophic eventually shows up with your name on it. So if you want to call an MRI “routine,” be my guest. But for me — and the rest of us who have to get them — a “routine MRI” is really just a regularly scheduled check-in to make sure whatever abnormal thing we’ve got going on inside of us is either not that serious, or, if it is serious, hasn’t leveled up like a video-game villain while we weren’t looking.

At this point, I’ve had so many MRIs that when someone even mentions one in a doctor’s office, my reflex is to ask, “With or without contrast?” the same way normal people ask, “Hot or iced?” The whole point is to keep the serious thing from becoming more serious by catching it early and slapping it back into place. That’s the reality. And the very least Trump’s orbit could do is respect the truth. But they won’t. They lie because the truth forces them to confront realities they are neither prepared for nor intellectually equipped to handle. And if “preventative MRI” is the best PR spin they can muster, then the real diagnosis here isn’t medical. It’s moral rot.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons.