President Donald Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Wasilla, Alaska, on Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026, that he has never once had the flu — an assertion that runs against steep medical odds.
The claim came as the president riffed on James Talarico, the Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Texas, who stepped off the campaign trail while sick with the flu. Republicans falsely suggested the absence was a mental-health crisis. Those claims have been debunked, but Trump appeared eager to breathe fresh air into the conspiracy theories from the stage.
“What the hell happened to him for 14 days?” Trump asked.
“What happened? Tala-freako. What happened to him? He said he had the flu for 12 to 14 days. I never had the flu for 14 days. Actually, I never had the flu. How lucky am I?” he continued.
Talarico’s last in-person campaign event was Sept. 26, and he returned to the trail on Friday, Oct. 9, about 13 days, NBC News reported.
Can Anyone Really Dodge the Flu?
The president is most likely fudging the record, or simply unaware of his own medical history — though a lifetime without influenza is not flatly impossible.
A study released in 2015 that drew blood samples from volunteers ages seven to 81 found that children caught the flu roughly every other year, while the rate fell to about twice a decade after age 30. Infection also does not always announce itself: 8 percent of people who had the influenza virus reported no symptoms at all, according to research cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There is another wrinkle in Trump’s favor. Flu vaccines became available to civilians in 1946, the year he was born, and vaccination can blunt the severity of symptoms — meaning a case can come and go without feeling like the flu at all.
A Rally Full of Familiar Claims
The flu boast was one line in a speech that arrived with three weeks to go until the November midterms, and it sat alongside a string of assertions the president has made before. Trump again defended his war on Iran by insisting that “they were two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon,” he said at the rally.
That is false. U.S. intelligence agencies told Congress in 2025 that Iran suspended its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003. In the summer of 2025, Trump ordered the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities and said afterward that the strikes had wiped out the country’s nuclear program. In February 2026, he announced that a full-scale war on Iran was necessary to keep Tehran from obtaining a weapon.
He also called on Alaska to repeal ranked choice voting and repeated his claim that South Korea agreed to invest $50 billion in an Alaska pipeline, a deal Korean officials have denied. He closed by promising to dole out money if Republicans win in November.
Scrutiny Over the President’s Health
Trump’s declarations of peak fitness have long outpaced the visible evidence. His weight, bruised hands, swollen ankles and apparent penchant for nodding off in public settings have generated concern. The president, for his part, pronounced himself in perfect health following his physical exam in May.
The president has also been asked about the security arrangements surrounding his travel. He has said his secret flight out of Turkey, which employed a passenger-filled decoy Air Force One carrying Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was the Secret Service’s and the military’s call, and that he simply followed their instructions. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew on the other aircraft with Trump. Asked whether he knew of a specific threat, the president said he had not asked much about it and that he receives a great many threats.
As for the flu, Trump’s record on illness has not always matched his public account. He contracted COVID-19 during the pandemic and suffered serious consequences that were not acknowledged publicly at the time, according to reporting published in February 2021 — a reminder that “how lucky am I?” is a question the president tends to answer himself.
