President Donald Trump gave Chinese President Xi Jinping a tour of Marine One during a state visit on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, and a boxy shape appeared again under his suit jacket. The tour video went viral. The White House, as of Sept. 25, still had not said what the box-like shape is.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar posted a clip of the Marine One tour on X on Sept. 24. “i once again ask what in the hell is going on with Trump’s huge *** and the contraption he has on it,” he wrote. The Lincoln Project replied to the post: “@depend how big do you make these????”
Another user quipped: “I would estimate that Trump is 25 percent larger than Xi except for his butt region, which is 400 percent larger than Xi. It’s so disproportionately huge, that his jacket cannot even lie straight.”
Social media users, watching the Sept. 24 footage, guessed at a medical device, a back support brace, specialized orthopedic equipment, or a heavy-duty ballistic vest or armored plating tailored under his suit as explanations for the rigid, square outline.
A Shape Seen Since April
The bump had surfaced days earlier, on Wednesday, Sept. 16, during a campaign trip to North Carolina, with the shape clearly visible through the back of the suit of the 80-year-old president. White House aide Margo Martin supplied that footage in a short video on her Instagram story, having filmed Trump as he took questions from reporters in front of Air Force One. The video showed the shape pushing the jacket fabric into an unnatural wrinkle, and it stayed fixed in place while he spoke.
The shape first drew notice in April, when viewers of Trump’s “60 Minutes” appearance zeroed in on an odd outline beneath his jacket. Weeks later, a bulge in his clothing was caught by cameras at the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, May 25, setting off another round of online commentary. Trump appeared at that ceremony alongside Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Karoline Leavitt, then-White House press secretary, who has since left the job, put footage from a rally on Long Island up on X on Friday, Aug. 14. The clip shows Trump walking down from the stage toward the crowd, with something rigid pushing the back of his suit jacket outward and never shifting as he moves. Once the Long Island video circulated, Rupar wrote on X: “It looks like he has some sort of contraption back there.” Similar box-like shapes were also noticed at a rally in Texas earlier this year.
Claims that Trump wears adult diapers keep recurring and are not new. Noel Casler, a comedian and former staffer on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” is reported to be the origin of the rumor; he has claimed the president soiled himself and wore the garments while the show was in production in the late 2000s. On the Daily Beast podcast “Inside Trump’s Head,” presidential biographer Michael Wolff, who has been a prominent skeptic of the diaper claim, conceded that nothing supports it.
What the White House Said
White House spokesman Davis Ingle, asked about the bulge, emailed a statement on Thursday, Sept. 17, to the Daily Beast that attacked the news organization instead of addressing the bulge.
“Only the glue-sniffing degenerates at the failing Daily Beast would obsessively push baseless conspiracy theories about President Trump, and that’s because they suffer from a severe, crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has completely rotted their peanut-sized brains,” Ingle said.
He continued in the same statement: “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, relentless work ethic, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration when Democrats and the legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.”
Scrutiny of His Health
No president has been older at inauguration than Trump. Photographers have captured his bruised hands, swollen ankles and a neck rash. Critics have charged that his right leg drags or taps as he moves.
New footage of Trump walking away from reporters toward Marine One circulated online as of Sept. 28, and viewers fixed on his left leg. “What’s with his left leg?” one person asked. “I noticed that, too. It’s like he’s flinging it forward instead of stepping normally,” another replied.
The X account @Acyn posted the walking clip online. Rupar wrote on X about separate footage of Trump walking a red carpet ahead of Xi’s arrival: “Watch Trump walking here — he can’t walk in a straight line.”
Cameras have also caught him asleep during public events, including the Sept. 11 anniversary ceremony at the Pentagon, where he seemed unable to hold his eyes open.
His mental sharpness has drawn questions just as persistently. The president has repeatedly bragged about how he did on a dementia screening exam, which he characterizes as a measure of intelligence. At the Long Island rally, Trump appeared to misplace the name of Saritha Komatireddy, his endorsed candidate for New York attorney general. He told the crowd that day had been the first time he met her, then called out from the podium to locate her.
An open letter signed by 36 medical professionals, entered into the Congressional Record on April 30, called for Trump’s removal from office under the 25th Amendment. Henry David Abraham, a psychiatrist who signed the letter, said in a SiriusXM interview in early September with host Dean Obeidallah that the president had become “worse” since the letter. “I mean, if an airline pilot had half of the symptoms that the president of the United States has, we would not let him on an airplane. We certainly wouldn’t want to fly with him,” Abraham said.
Doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center kept him for more than three hours during a checkup on May 26. Afterward, Trump posted on Truth Social that “everything” had “checked out PERFECTLY,” and he called the visit his “6 month physical.” Administration officials have insisted he remains in excellent health.
