Trump confirms Trump not dead, despite liberal apoplexy 

Here’s some not-so-breaking news: President Trump is perfectly fine, quite alive, and very much not dead.  

Confirmation comes straight from the president himself, who was surprised and slightly bemused at a press conference yesterday, following widespread speculation that perhaps there was something wrong with the president’s health. 

Bored, gossip-minded social media sleuths often scrutinize pictures and videos of famous people — or the lack thereof — for evidence that the celebrity in question is unwell, or possibly already dead and replaced like Paul McCartney or Avril Lavigne, according to false internet rumors. Recently, Trump has been the object of some of this speculation, to the extent that the hashtag #trumpdead was trending on social media.  

Obviously, no serious person really thought Trump was dead, though his appearance, his cadence, his vigor has all been scrutinized: He is, after all, the oldest person to ever assume the presidency. 

Trump’s hand, in particular, has been of interest — not just to random social media people, but also mainstream and progressive media outlets like The Daily Beast and New York magazine.  

His hand, to be fair, has appeared bruised, in a manner that suggests, to me, IV treatments. 

But before any media folks start worrying about Trump too much — and we know they are worried because oh, they love him so — let’s consider this reality check straight from the horse’s mouth: Donald Trump himself, who was asked whether he was dead by Fox News’s Peter Doocy. 

Trump immediately got to the heart of the matter — the double standard at play. You probably see it coming… 

“I didn’t do any [news conferences] for two days and they said, ‘there must be something wrong with him.’ Biden wouldn’t do ’em for months, you wouldn’t see him, and nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him, and we know he wasn’t in the greatest of shape.” 

Now, while I may not agree with everything President Trump wrote on Truth Social over the weekend, I do agree with his overall point: the mainstream media’s interest in Trump’s health seems more than a little disingenuous, especially when it’s coming from people who failed to properly vet former President Biden’s health.  

And I don’t mean to keep harping on this subject, because at this point we have exhaustively litigated the fact that Biden had declined precipitously during the last two years of his presidency, but was shielded from the press and his own Cabinet by a very small number of advisers — and, with a few rare exceptions, basically no one spoke up about it. The media certainly failed to do their job and demand access to the president, or point out that if they weren’t getting access, maybe the public should start drawing conclusions about what that means. 

Perhaps the media will say, “hey now, we realize we screwed up, and we want to do a better job this time, and so we are being overly sensitive about any possible information that might point toward Trump’s decline.” But the American public might find that a little hard to believe. 

In any case, if Trump’s health does decline, or his advanced age does catch up with him, you’ll probably be the first to know — and you won’t need the mainstream media to tell you. That’s because Trump is uniquely accessible; not just compared with Biden, but compared with any other president in U.S. history. He sits for lengthy podcasts, he takes questions from the press, he converses with his Cabinet with great regularity. If he does alter that schedule, or disappear from the public eye, I hope the mainstream media does ask questions about that. But the evidence will be self-apparent.  

As Elon Musk likes to say about the community on X, which is really a stand-in for the online American public: you are the media now. 

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.