POTUS appears deeply unwell. Just less than two weeks ago, social media was teeming with rumors he was dead. But you wouldn't know it from legacy media, who'd obsessed over Biden's health but seems largely disinterested in the rapid deterioration of our current president.
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There is something physically wrong with President Donald Trump.
He walks haltingly, speaks incoherently, forgets names and places and mixes up dates and statistics, making up numbers where none exist.
Lately, Trump’s public appearances have become increasingly rare: Whereas now he is only available for a brief presser or a short scripted appearance to commemorate something, he used to stand at the podium and hector and insult reporters for hours. Last year, he would hold hours-long campaign rallies, whipping up his angry fans with racist rhetoric and sexist chants.
Now he’s barely present.
His hands are bruised, his ankles swollen, and his eyes squint blankly into the distance.
The White House claims he has a circulatory problem that explains the swelling ankles, that he shakes too many hands and that’s why his hands are bruised and covered in makeup, and that his confused social media posts are works of staggering genius.
But they’re clearly hiding something because we can see he is deeply unwell. And if we depend on the corporate press to tell us what that something is, we’ll be waiting until his funeral.
Instead, reporters would rather spend time mocking those of us who are alarmed by Trump’s actions, even as his erratic behavior puts Americans at risk.
“Mr. Trump’s critics have speculated about his health for as long as he has been in national politics. And for his part, 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. But there had never been a conspiracy wave as feverish as this one,” New York Times reporter Katie Rogers wrote in a story snarkily headlined “President Trump Is Alive. The Internet Was Convinced Otherwise.”
By dismissing concerns about Trump’s health as a “conspiracy wave” driven by, the story went on to say, “TikTok influencers,” the Times and all the other news outlets that followed suit were preemptively declaring that they’d investigate no further.
Trump has a long history of lying about his health, and having others lie for him. Those falsehoods were eagerly lapped up by compliant news outlets during his first term, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the pattern continues in his second.
However, the obviousness of his decline, together with the month-long publicity tour CNN’s Jake Tapper took on the back of former President Joe Biden’s health issues, make the media’s neglect of Trump’s problems so blatantly hypocritical, it’s outrageous.
When President Biden stumbled over his words, the media framed it as a national crisis. Consider that a slate of New York Times op-ed writers and George Clooney demanded Biden step down and allow someone younger and spryer to challenge Trump. When Biden forgot someone’s name after a long day on the campaign trail, a blue-ribbon CNN panel debated whether Biden was actively dying or simply mortally ill.
“The White House regularly releases corrected transcripts of [Biden’s] remarks, in which he frequently mixes up places, people or dates,” wrote Times reporters in a 2024 story about “Biden’s lapses.” “The administration did so in the days after the debate, when Biden mixed up the countries of France and Italy when talking about war veterans at an East Hampton fund-raiser.”
Had Biden disappeared from public view for a week, reappeared looking frail with makeup covering obvious bruises on his hands, and then ranted incoherently about patrolling the streets himself looking for immigrants to kidnap, all the major networks would be calling on Congress to remove him from office.
With Trump, it’s passed off as business as usual for a president who “challenges norms” or “pushes the boundaries of legality” or however else the media are euphemizing his rampant lawbreaking abuses of power, and thousands of acts of petty cruelty. Because he breaks the rules so frequently, the rules might as well no longer exist!
The U.S. has recent examples of presidents who’ve hidden health concerns or downplayed real impairments in office. Ronald Reagan’s son said his father developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease while still in office. John F. Kennedy hid his use of opiates for severe back pain, along with other health conditions, during his term. Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a series of strokes and his wife, Edith, effectively ran the country, refusing to tell anyone what was wrong with her husband.
The point isn’t that presidential health is never of interest. In this visible public position, how a chief executive handles a serious health condition can be a model for the public, and any number of conditions might affect the person’s ability to do their job. While we don’t need updates about the president’s hemorrhoids or back acne during the State of the Union, anything that impairs their decision-making is obviously relevant.
But the lack of focus on Trump’s health feels deliberate, and is part of a longstanding pattern of giving him a pass for things his political opponents must grapple with. He’s presumed to be so abnormal that he may “exceed boundaries” while everyone else must answer according to the pre-Trump order.
When Hillary Clinton, then age 68, caught pneumonia on the 2016 campaign trail, ABC News called it a “major campaign moment” that “has the potential to upend the race for the White House.”
She was out of commission for all of three days, which anyone who’s had pneumonia at any age knows is a lightning fast recovery time, but NBC News still called it a “health scare” and raised NINE “unanswered questions” about that 72-hour span:
Clinton’s core vulnerability is that most Americans don’t find her honest or trustworthy. Will voters now feel like they’ve been misled about her health? Or will the vulnerability of the illness make Americans empathize more with someone who often has difficulty connecting.
In the very next paragraph, NBC admitted that “to be sure, we know vastly more about Clinton’s health than we do about Donald Trump’s.”
They’ve apparently learned nothing since.