Trump’s Not Dead, but That’s Not the Point

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Yesterday afternoon, President Donald Trump hosted a pool of reporters in the Oval Office to announce that the space operations of the United States would be relocating to Alabama, and—more crucially—that the man was still alive. Trump, you see, was uncharacteristically absent from the public eye last week. The president wasn’t available for press access on Wednesday or Thursday and didn’t have any events scheduled through Labor Day weekend. So when an itinerary surfaced showing that Trump was slated to make an unspecified “announcement,” the country’s most beleaguered #resisters crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. Bluesky and Twitter roiled with unsubstantiated speculation about the president’s health. Had he suffered a massive heart attack? Was he about to resign? Would this address amount to Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance propping up the bloated corpse of the moldering incumbent, Weekend at Bernie’s–style? The answer to all those questions, of course, was no. As far as Trump media gaggles go, this was pretty mild. He yukked it up with Tommy Tuberville, he bungled the minutiae of Alabama college football, and when he was asked about the death rumors, he shrugged it off, saying he “didn’t see that,” adding, “It’s sort of crazy.”

It was a typically spiritless ending to what was, without a doubt, a memorable spree of posting. There was not one moment over the course of the Labor Day festivities that I truly thought the president was dead, but from the outside looking in, I did relish the mass hysteria that briefly derailed the peace. The engines of the speculation were, of course, the same liberals who once amassed a giant following by making 1,000-tweet-long threads about Russiagate and the imminence with which Trump was about to be arrested for treason. They circulated a way-too-zoomed-in photo from the president’s golf excursion on Saturday,^[2] in which one of his eyelids appears to be a little droopy, as singular proof that the incumbent had just suffered an enfeebling stroke. (Other questions, like why the president would be golfing after a cardiac event, went unanswered.) Elsewhere, the gossip grew more psychedelic. Theories of body doubles abounded, as did the assertion that roads around Washington’s Walter Reed hospital had been shut down under conspicuous circumstances. “The president is in surgery, or something happened to him,” claimed a total nobody to the tune of 752,000 views. (His reasoning was that, according to a website that tracks pizza orders near government agencies, there was a spike in orders to a nearby Papa John’s.)

The whole spectacle possessed the energy of a nationwide role-playing session. Did anyone really believe that the president was dead? Yes, I’m sure some of the hardcore conspiratorialists did. But the most common sentiment I detected from Democrats over the weekend was a devil-may-care resignation to the absurd. Sure, why not? Let’s all agree that the president has been permanently incapacitated, at least for a couple of days. (A funnier notion, found in more lefty corners of the electorate, was that Trump might have suffered a “reverse-Fetterman stroke”—that, unlike the Pennsylvania senator, who seems to have become much more reactionary after his brush with death, a hypothetical Trump brain implosion might unlock the president’s latent wokeness.)

To me, it all seems like the tacit admission that, despite our best efforts, nobody truly knows how to defeat MAGAdom. The movement has sealed its influence with a stunning popular-vote victory and is firmly entrenched in the White House. His second term has already proved much more disastrous than the first. American democratic institutions are actively being degraded. In fact, the only way out of this mess, after all other efforts have failed, might very well be a sudden medical catastrophe.

That is obviously a gauche outcome to root for, but it’s not as if MAGAdom has any room to complain. We are fresh off a four-year cycle with Joe Biden replete with the exact same accusations: body doubles, brain hemorrhages, underexplained departures from public view. Ultimately, some of those charges proved true. Biden was old, in ways that became only more visible as time marched onward. But he is no longer president, and all the lingering anxieties of the gerontocracy have been passed on to the new guy. Because, and this needs to be repeated as often as possible, Trump is also very old. The man is turning 80 next year, and if not for Biden’s macabre levels of out-to-lunch ineptitude at the tail end of his administration, society would be much more attuned to the fact that the president is miles more wobbly than he was during his first go-around, in 2016. Can you blame Democrats for finally being able to join in on the fun?

Notably, Trump is already exhibiting some classic old-guy frailty: the swollen ankles; the weird bruises; the appearance, when photographed at the right angle, of being drenched in formaldehyde. This is only going to become more acute in the years ahead. Barring the aforementioned medical catastrophe, an 82-year-old Trump will be conducting official state business in 2028. It’s a good reminder that for as interminable as the MAGA dominion has felt, this is a movement in crisis. Death slowly encroaches upon the God Emperor. The reality becomes more pertinent with each passing day, and no successor has been named. At some point in the extremely foreseeable future, another person must become the standard-bearer for Trumpism, and the field looks to be eminently defeatable. More than anything else, that’s why I think liberals are so prepared to savor that fateful day. The Republicans have spent eight long years structuring the party around precisely whatever it is that Trump demands at any passing moment. It has worked out beautifully for them, but soon—maybe very soon—they’ll need to discover what comes next. I don’t like their chances.

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