There was a strange shimmer of hope in the air this past weekend. The weather in the Northeast was perfect: sunny, warm enough, big blue skies. The sun dawdled along the fading of summer. People were out smiling, shopping and bopping, having a beer in the sun with their friends. It was a holiday weekend, too, which meant three gorgeous days filled with possibility. The hope, that extra bright thing in the air, was the possibility that President Donald Trump might have been dead, or at the very least was going to die soon.
The rumors began in earnest early last week, after weeks of speculation about the president’s health. All summer, Trump has been spotted with a blotchy yellow patch of concealer slapped onto the back of one of his hands. When asked about the smear of unblended makeup in July, the press secretary did what this administration does best, and just made something up, which was that the makeup was to cover up a bruise (probably true) caused by shaking too many hands (obviously a lie). This lie was not that new. The president himself said that the bruise was from “shaking hands with thousands of people” last December in an interview with Time.
It seems far more likely that the bruise is from an IV that had been placed in the top of the hand, doesn’t it? That would make sense. He is 79 years old, for god’s sake—how else does an old person get a bruise on the top of their hand? Then, in mid-July, the White House confirmed that Trump had indeed been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that leads to swelling and bruising; this explanation followed conversation about how and why Trump’s lower extremities had come to be so swollen. The condition is not a death sentence, but the admission did nothing to calm the speculation. They could be lying! They’d lied before! People posted, furiously and hopefully, that the bruise or the swelling or both could be a sign that Trump has congestive heart failure. That one can be fatal! You know who else had a strange hand bruise? Queen Elizabeth II! She was photographed with one on the day before she died. There was a lot of this kind of thing.
Any conspiracy can, and must, find its own facts. The American population is primed for one about the health of the president. The nation just watched the Biden administration lie directly to the American people for months about the health and mental clarity of the president; it wasn’t just random posters speculating about Biden’s physical and mental health, either, but major newspapers. A good deal of this was stupid and wrong, but the fact of it is indisputable, which was that people near Biden trotted him out to be seen and photographed, and worked to keep him in a position of immense power, while doubting that he had the cognitive ability to any of it. Biden was 80 years old—just a few months older than Trump is now—when he shuffled out onto that debate stage last summer and accidentally revealed his true state to the nation. And Trump famously is in much worse shape than Biden was. His stomach is lined with well-done steak; his blood is half Diet Coke. No clean bill of health from his personal physician can water down those facts. He has never even pretended to stop drinking that garbage.
So last week, when Trump had no pool events or public appearances for several days in a row and didn’t post anything on Truth Social about his precious tariffs being struck down again, the conspiracy was right there for the grabbing. He was sick! Or dead! It had all been right in front of our faces all along.
There have been so many moments when I have thought, or just let myself believe, that Trump might finally fail to wriggle his way out of one of the many corners he has backed himself into. His many criminal convictions notwithstanding, I have not been right yet. As a result of that experience, I had come to believe that I was immune to this kind of baseless hope by now.
But also: He really has seemed slower and less vigorous during this administration than the last one. Even during the campaign, he was experiencing frequent mental brownouts. His barbs aren’t as sharp as they used to be; his jokes don’t seem to arrive as quickly, or finish arriving at all. The bruising was certainly real, and so was his disappearance from public for a few days last week. The thing that really got me, though, was something Trump said off-handedly when he called into Fox & Friends on Aug. 19. When talking about his motivation to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, Trump said, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
He said this in that tone he has, as if he’s delivering a joke whose punchline isn’t really for you to hear. But even in that tone, the statement felt more vulnerable than most things Trump says. He’s talked about heaven plenty, of course. He believes his mother is there, and maybe his father. He has referenced them looking down upon him many times, including after he was convicted on 34 felony counts. But this felt different, and that was what got me to believe. Maybe he really was dying after all.
The thought spread tendrils in my brain so quickly. I wanted it to happen on my birthday, ideally, so that everyone would also already be out at the bars. I wanted to get sloppy and silly and high off the fact that this man could no longer hurt anyone else I loved. His vile works aside, Trump is also my personal enemy because he tear-gassed the protest I was in so that he could stage a photo op in 2020. I wish him nothing but ill. The thought buoyed me. I knew better, but there it was.
Then on the morning of Sept. 2, 2025, the White House pool reporters were alerted that the president would make an announcement at 2 p.m. ET. I did not actually believe he was dead; I couldn’t really imagine him even admitting to being unwell. What I hoped, and the most I could let myself hope, was that he would be trotted out to talk and would fail. Maybe he’d stumble over his words. Maybe he’d forget someone’s name. Maybe he’d show the same kind of undeniable mental decline that Biden had. I could not quite let myself believe that any of it would matter, but I decided it would be satisfying.
He was late to the announcement. Presidents are almost always late unless they are interrupting primetime TV, so this meant nothing. But this stirred the conspiracies more. Why was he late? Was it because they were busy shoving a pair of sunglasses onto his face and propping him up, Weekend At Bernie’s style? He was late enough that the top Google search result for the announcement (from Fox 35 Orlando) replaced their livestream of the outside of the White House with a livestream of a beach. The chat was flooded with hope. “No one mourns the wicked,” someone posted. Another wrote, “Fingers crossed its Vance sitting behind that desk.” This was where we were: speculating, somewhat brightly, about President JD Vance.
And then there Trump was on the stream and every news channel, in a suit with a red and blue tie and his makeup done. He looked the same as he always does: tired, orange, bored, old. He spoke the way he always does, peppering in asides and little un-jokes that were not on the teleprompter, moving from subject to subject the way someone switches tabs on the computer. He was alive, even maybe fine. As well as he ever is, anyway.
What is there to say about the press conference? It was boring at first. The government is moving the space command headquarters from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. This is so boring; it certainly did not feel important enough to demand a live television appearance. Trump made a couple of jokes about Auburn and Alabama football, and the requisite collection of sycophants in suits laughed as loud as they could manage. Eventually Trump stepped aside so that everyone else there—Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, various Alabama elected officials—could take the mic and say thank you to him. It was boring enough and rote enough that CNN cut away from the press conference to show commercials until the president returned to answer questions.
The channels all cut back to the Oval Office for that part. This is different than it used to be, because the White House has taken great pains to make sure the assembled media includes plenty of representatives from the partisan outlets whose sole purpose is to suck up to Trump. The second question, from a Fox News reporter whose father is a Fox & Friends co-host, was about the death rumors. “How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” he asked. “Did you see that?”
Trump said no. His face was blank. “People didn’t see you for a couple of days,” the reporter said, dumping a bunch of metrics onto the end of his sentence to shape it a bit more like a question. Behind the president, Vance shook his head vehemently, as if to indicate that he does not like it, and that he has never once in his life thought about the president dying and him getting to sit behind the Resolute Desk. No siree. “Really?” Trump said. “I didn’t see that.” He then talked for several minutes, during which it became evident that in fact he did see that, and had thoughts about it.
The rest of the press conference, which I watched more or less as self-harm, went on the way all of Trump’s press conferences have for the last 10 years. Someone asks him a question, he kind of addresses it, or just rephrases it, and goes on several upsetting tangents along the way. This press conference was technically about the space command headquarters, but Trump also found time to express his belief that maybe some schoolteachers should be armed. He said that Chicago is a “hellhole” and that he would absolutely send the National Guard there, but he wouldn’t say when. He said that a video circulating of something being tossed from a White House window “must be AI” because the White House’s windows weighed “600 pounds” and so could not be opened. He alluded to what ended up being a military strike on a small boat that the government later said was carrying drugs out of Venezuela; 11 people were reportedly killed in the strike. He alluded to something coming about religious liberty. He said that everyone was happy with his extremely unpopular tariff program, which may or may not be ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. He said that he was going to the Supreme Court the next morning, actually, to try and get them to hurry up.
“Our country’s the hottest country in the world right now,” Trump said, which was something he was saying a lot before he abruptly stopped saying anything for a week. “Everyone is talking about the USA.” Near the end of the conference, Trump returned to this thought. “Without the United States, everything in the world would die,” he said. “We’re the hottest. We’re the best.”
It makes sense that Trump would think this; if there is one throughline in his life, this atavistic faith in hotness is it. All press would necessarily be good press to a career celebrity. If everyone is talking about the United States, if everyone is talking about him, then that’s evidence of his relevance, of his power, of his importance. If he is alive, he is winning. And he isn’t dead! Nothing can hurt him! He will live forever! He’s the same as he’s always been. He is better than he’s ever been, the hottest, the best.
This is, I think, a big part of what is so exhausting about Donald Trump. Not just how venal and stupid and boring and cruel he is, but how constant all of that is. He has proved himself immune from all scandal because he fundamentally does not acknowledge that those scandals exist, or that he should be embarrassed by them. He is willing to make new ones to cause the first to disappear, and to just keep doing that for as long as it takes. If you lie 50 times in a press conference, which one does the media fixate on? If a bunch of people die or get hate-crimed because of what you say and do, well, he’s not thinking about that. It’s not happening to him, so it is not his problem.
He’s thinking about himself. And part of what made the fixation on his death sing the way it did, I think, is that we are all exhausted with this. It’s relentless and boring; it feels infinite, and indeed it will not stop or slow down until Trump finally kicks off forever. For more than a decade we have listened to this man do this exact same thing, hurt a bunch of people as a result, and walk away unscathed. Even in the fantasy of his death, Trump would be dying in his bed, in the White House, in power.
The press conference, ultimately, told us nothing that we didn’t already know; very few things Trump does ever could. He is a very old man with a big ego and very little care for the people he governs. He is erratic and strong-willed and, unfortunately, can be very funny. It’s possible, of course, that he is indeed dying. Haven’t we just experienced an administration that lied to us for a very long time about the president’s well-being and mental clarity? And didn’t that president also appear in public many times and speak normally on camera and seem more or less fine?
There’s no guarantee that when Trump does eventually die, we will be any better off. Despite their desperate attempts in the first administration to separate themselves from him, Trump is the Republican Party. They believe all the same things he believes. They vote the way he votes, and support him in a way that suggests they understand that everything they have depends upon their absolute and abject loyalty to him. Vance is no better than him; his job depends upon that. Just because he is more presentable and less vulgar does not mean Vance is a better person, or would be a better president. In fact, he may be worse. His beliefs are the same and he is more efficient; his ambitions are broader, and no less cynical or cruel. Vance does not have the charm and charisma that Trump has, and presents more as a normal politician, but also I grew up a Texan governed by a slew of nice looking, well-presented men who destroyed the entire fabric of that state for the benefit of a few billionaires. I know what the JD Vances of this world can do, and how eager they are to do it.
Last weekend, that felt like a problem for another day. The hell we don’t know, in this case, seems far more appealing than the hell we already occupy; it seemed, almost, like something to hope for. But then maybe something, anything, new would feel better than this endless degrading orbit, one moment after the next, somehow both the same and worse.
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