By MICHAEL STEVENSON It was a strange time in American politics in the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan was leading a party that was desperate for a leader to help them win a second term.
For the president, who was then running against Gerald Ford in the 1984 election, the prospect of a second-term loss was more than a bit unnerving.
His own personal problems had been well documented.
He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 1983 and the following year was treated for a massive blood clot in his lungs.
He returned to the White House after six months of recuperation to become the Republican presidential nominee in 1984.
In 1984, Reagan was given a new diagnosis: cancer of the pancreas.
This time, the condition was more severe and advanced than previous cancers.
He lost a great deal of weight, and it was discovered that he had undergone surgery to remove a tumour in his pancreae, which was causing the blood clot.
Reagan underwent two major surgeries.
He also underwent chemotherapy, and was placed on a ventilator, which he used to breathe.
The medical professionals believed that he was in a good enough state to be allowed back into office.
He had not only recovered from his cancer, but he was able to walk again.
Reaganes condition was so bad that he couldn’t even talk to the doctors.
In a strange twist, his wife, Nancy Reagan, told reporters that she had just given birth to their second child, Donald Trump Jr, and that she was proud of him.
“I think it’s amazing how a person can become cancerous at the age of 46,” she said.
“I think he could be in the best shape of his life if he would just get the right treatments.”
A second surgery would have taken place two years later.
Reaction to the news was swift and negative.
The President was accused of “bizarre behavior” and a “torture of his own” by the liberal New York Times, and he was attacked by conservatives in the conservative movement, who branded him a “bitter man” and said he had “suffered from terminal brain cancer”.
As it turned out, there was more to it than that.
Trump was not a terminal cancer patient, as his doctors initially claimed.
But he had been diagnosed with stage III melanoma in his brain, which had spread to other parts of his body.
A biopsy was conducted and the cancerous cells removed.
Trump underwent two more operations, in May 1984 and July 1985, both in California.
Trump would go on to win both the Presidency and the general election.
But his recovery was not without its challenges.
He found himself in a new relationship with the former beauty queen and television personality Ivana Trump.
Trump, who at the time was running for the US Senate from New York, married the model in 1980.
The couple had a daughter together, Tiffany, who died of breast cancer in 1994.
The couple’s daughter, Ivanka, has since been married to Jared Kushner, who is a senior adviser to the President.
Trump and Ivana were also seen together in public, often in a state of affection.
In January 2017, she told the Associated Press that she still admired Trump and wanted to be his wife:”I still admire him.
I still love him.
He’s one of the greatest people I’ve ever known.
He made a lot of mistakes in life, but I always admired him and I always wanted to marry him.
And I think he’s very, very good at what he does.
And he deserves everything he gets.”
Trump’s family and close associates were furious at the treatment of the President, but some of his close advisers were less sympathetic.
On January 22, 1992, a few weeks after his diagnosis, then-President Bill Clinton gave his first interview to the Associated Journal.
He said that Trump was “one of the most brilliant and accomplished men I have ever known” and that he believed that the President’s condition was “probably terminal”.
In his second interview, he also said that he could see the cancer growing.
“He is probably in the third or fourth year of terminal cancer,” he said.
But Trump had made it clear in those first interviews that he did not think he would be able to recover from his diagnosis.
He said he was “really, really worried”.
And he also had been told by his doctors that his condition was very serious, so he was advised not to tell his wife.
In June 1993, just two weeks after that interview, the President announced that he would not seek a second Presidential term.
But after that, he said that the cancer was “very serious” and he would need to have the treatment “immediately”.
He told reporters at a news conference that he hoped that by the time he was ready to return to the presidency, the cancer would be gone.
The following year, he was diagnosed