By Becket Adams
Sunday, September 07, 2025
The online hysteria over Trump’s health should have been
roundly condemned, not treated as a quirky viral cultural event.
Aconstant irritation for the American political writer is
that there exist so many profane, discipline-specific epithets for which there are
no polite alternatives.
The pundit or reporter is therefore left to rely on
watered-down stand-ins — say, “dirty trickster” — that just don’t convey the true picture.
We see similar failures of language and tone whenever the press covers the
left-wing fringe, a failure so common and dependable as to be intentional.
Why do reporters willingly understate left-wing lunacy of
the highest degree? The answer is simple: The corporate press’s greatest flaw is its willingness to
believe the worst of its enemies and the best of its friends.
Which brings us to the Donald death-watch hysteria.
A family member remarked last weekend that she heard
President Trump had died. Neither my sister-in-law nor I had any idea what this
was about, but we soon found our answer. The more deranged and self-harming
corners of left-wing social media evidently decided that the president had died
and that the public was being kept in the dark. The conspiracy theory went
viral, escaping the echo chambers of X etc. and landing in the laps of
nonpolitical types such as my family member.
Trump is not dead, by the way.
By any objective standard, this trending topic was
completely batty. It’s ridiculous that anyone believed the president had
quietly died and that “influencers” somehow knew about it, in spite of the
White House’s supposed efforts to hide “the truth.” It’s crazier that these
rantings crossed over into civil discourse.
It’s also deeply annoying that the left’s obviously
alarming behavior will once again escape the scrutiny that the media
traditionally apply to similarly alarming delusions from the far right.
After a weekend of left-wing zealots’ convincing
themselves (and those caught in the blast radius) of a White House–wide
conspiracy involving a secretly dead president, the response from the press has
been little more than a grin and a mirthful, “You rascals!”
“President Trump Is Alive. The Internet Was Convinced
Otherwise,” reported the New York Times.
The report presented the narrative in a strangely
sympathetic tone: “President Trump had nothing on his public schedule for three
days last week. He is often sporting a large, purple bruise on his right hand,
which he sometimes slathers with makeup. His ankles are swollen. He is the
oldest person to be elected president . . . [and] he has long declined to
explain when and why he has sought out medical care, whether he was suffering
from Covid or undergoing routine procedures.”
“For years, justifiable concerns and questions about Mr.
Trump’s health have often been met with obfuscation or minimal explanation from
the people around him,” the Times added. “Mr. Trump’s physicians have
not taken questions from reporters in years, and there were no medical
briefings held after an assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., last
summer.”
No, Trump isn’t dead. But can you blame them for
thinking he was?
In other corners of the news and entertainment business,
certain members of the pundit class, including MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, further rationalized the theory’s spread.
“Look,” said the former White House press secretary, who
claims, to this day, that she knew nothing of former President Joe Biden’s
mental and physical decline, “we may never know why Donald Trump suddenly spent
a week hiding entirely from the American public, but you don’t actually need
baseless online conspiracies to explain why he might not want to show his face
in public right now.”
For the record, Psaki’s former boss once went a full 239
days without holding a solo press conference. Naturally, this overlapped with
his 577 days of vacation.
Elsewhere, New York magazine launched a live-tracker, which is
being regularly updated, titled, “What’s the Deal With Trump’s Hand Bruise and
Health Issues?”
The article attempts to ask, and answer, among other
things: How long has Trump had this hand bruise? What did Trump say about the
bruise? How did the White House explain Trump’s hand-bruising? Is Trump’s
bruise always in the same place? How long has Trump been putting makeup on his
hand? What’s going on with Trump’s ankles? What happened with those red marks
on Trump’s hand? How did Trump reveal his chronic venous insufficiency
diagnosis? What is chronic venous insufficiency? Is chronic venous insufficiency
fatal? What treatment is Trump being given? What’s the latest news on Trump’s
health? Is Trump still covering up the hand bruise?
Imagine a scenario where New York magazine
responded to the Comet pizza affair with a live-ticker of child
sex-trafficking cases, as a way to somehow give substance to the perpetrator’s
delusions.
The soft-pedaling of the left’s love affair with
conspiracy theories is probably a small thing compared with the actual
proliferation of those theories on social media — but it’s still annoying! It’s
one of the more pronounced examples of how media standards are applied
unevenly. For a press that is usually quick to condemn quackery,
conspiracy-mongering, and disinformation from the right, it sure seems
reluctant to utter a cross word about any of these things when they come from
the left.
Compare the Times’ coverage to how it covered a
similar conspiracy regarding Biden in 2024. Back then, the paper, with several
wags of a scolding finger, reported, “Far Right Spreads Baseless Claims About
Biden’s Whereabouts.” It added with a note of indignant defensiveness,
“President Biden, who has been sidelined with Covid, is set to address the
nation this week.”
This is to say nothing of the Times’ earlier
efforts to quash reasonable and obviously justified questions about Biden’s
deterioration while in office. This effort included mainstreaming the Biden
White House’s ludicrous “cheapfakes” narrative. (Relatedly: Axios’s Alex
Thompson reported that a “fairly senior person” in the Biden administration
once remarked that they “could not believe” reporters actually promoted the
obviously contrived “cheapfakes” defense.)
This industry has dedicated an enormous amount of time
and resources over the past decade to reporting on and supposedly combating
disinformation, bogus narratives, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. Entirely
made-up news beats were created for the occasion, with newsrooms such as NBC
News and the Washington Post bestowing upon badly prepared staffers the
title of “disinformation reporter.” Millions of words and thousands of hours of
television programming have been devoted to the topic of falsehoods and hoaxes.
When it’s QAnon or any other weird flavor of right-coded
crankery, major media are Johnny-on-the-spot with soliloquies about how now,
more than ever, we need Truth.
Yet these same people rarely, if ever, seem to treat with
the same level of alarm and seriousness (and contempt) the BlueAnon quacks who
believe in such things as secret presidential deaths, faked assassination
attempts, and Kremlin presidencies. Instead of outright denunciations and
demands for a “national conversation” about the dangers of the information
ecosystem in the digital era, we’re treated to a round of news stories that
loosely translate to, They’re wrong, but they have a point.
Ten years after Trump’s political ascent, it seems
evident that the press’s sense of urgency regarding conspiracies and hoaxes was
only ever intended to suffocate the right and those in its orbit. The entire
discourse has been a put-on, cloaked in the righteousness of safeguarding the
truth.
It’s a sham of such obviously shameless proportions as to
make even the worst “dirty trickster” blush.
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