Presidents have annual checkups. Donald Trump has been in for a “checkup” at Walter Reed three times in thirteen months. It’s hardly annual or bi-annual. Trump is now attempting to sell today’s checkup as a “six month” checkup. No, it’s more like four and change. Rick Wilson kicks in his two cents.
Let me say what the White House press corps cannot bring itself to say, what the Sunday shows have agreed to murmur around rather than at:
Donald John Trump is dying.
He is dying in the ordinary biological sense, the sense in which you and I and every warm-blooded creature on this rolling rock flying through space and time are dying.
He is seventy-nine. He turns eighty next month. He went to Walter Reed today, his third visit in thirteen months (“Totally normal! Just a third checkup in a year!”), and the White House would like you to believe this is a wellness influencer’s self-care routine rather than what it obviously is: the late-stage management of a long-abused body breaking down in public.
That’s the long and the short of it. I wonder if they did another cognitive test and Trump is going to regale us with the Ph.D. thesis that he came up with on the spot to pass the test. Be en garde, it could happen, although for now Trump is reporting “PERFECT” results.
Trump goes to Walter Reed for the third time in a year, with bruises hand-painted out of existence and a diagnosed circulatory disorder, and the coverage is what? A polite CBS write-around. A Washington Post nothingburger story detailing the drive up to Bethesda. A few brave souls noting that “independent physicians say the White House hasn’t answered key questions.” No Jake Tapper special. No glossy Original Sin book proposal. No “ten Republican senators speaking on background.” Just the press doing what the press always does in the presence of an authoritarian project: flinching.
This is the most dishonest White House about the President’s physical condition since Edith Wilson was forging her stricken husband’s signature behind the curtains in 1919. The parallel is not casual. The memos, the “excellent health,” the “sharpest president in American history,” the careful staging…the cover-up of Trump’s diminished physical and mental capacity isn’t coming.
The cover-up is already running. Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Chung, and the rest of the White House noise machine have lied to the media for years about Trump’s condition, and never once been held to account.
Here is where the second death becomes impossible to ignore.
Trump is winning nothing. Trump is holding nothing. He is narrowcasting to a withering, contracting MAGA base dying off at a rate that will soon reshape the political landscape again…and mistaking the cheers in ever-dwindling crowds, in ever-smaller halls for the sound of a country still living in 2016.
Pew, last month: 34 percent. The lowest of his second term. Fox News…Fox News…has him down 24 points with Republicans since March 2025. Rural white voters, the base of the base of the base, have gone from +27 net approval to -6 in twelve months. Among his own 2024 voters, approval has slid from 95 percent to 78.
The MAGA coalition is not growing. It is not holding. It is shedding, paycheck by smaller paycheck, grocery receipt by grocery receipt, slowly creeping away from cultlike adoration with every trip to the gas pump.
The cable hosts and the Truth Social cheerleaders do not understand this, because they have marinated for a decade in a closed informational system: winning a MAGA primary is not winning the country. Filling a local VFW hall with red hats is not winning the country. The cheers inside the tent get louder as the tent gets smaller. That’s not strength. That’s the acoustic property of a shrinking room.
So where does that leave us? In a situation where a man who is physically and mentally inadequate for the job that he is doing is still running the show. And the clock is ticking, all the clocks in fact, “biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot bully into stopping.”
This could be a real mess watching Trump fall apart piece by piece. Be ready for it. If you’ve ever lost an elderly friend/relative, all seems well until it isn’t well and then things start to go downhill fast.
Of course Trump is dying. We’re all dying. The key question is, “When?” His death before the end of his term could be a net advantage or disadvantage for the nation: I wouldn’t want to bet either way…
When?
Not soon enough!
He is deteriorating in front of us. His dementia is showing. Whatever blood disorder he has – I’d like to know. I was just diagnosed with one. I bruise easily and I get tired easier. But…..I DON’T HAVE DEMENTIA. I sleep at night and funciton during the day.
Personally……I want him dead. Hubby wants him in a bed having to get his soiled diapers changed to humiliate him. Oh well….vent done.
Being humiliated like that means he has to retain whatever grasp of reality he has now, otherwise he’ll be no more than any other unlucky rest home resident. Considering the family who’ll have to deal with (and support financially) ongoing care for a Diapered Demented Donnie, this could be considered a win either way.
I tend to agree with your hubby — after all, death is the merciful end of one’s pain and suffering.
I’m thinking he and they can only hide it/keep it together for so long. Like Ursula said, when it falls apart it will be like a landslide. We live in interesting times.
Compare and contrast with the treatment of Joe Biden having an occasional lapse – and tell me again about mainstream media liberal bias, and how republicans are discriminated against by this partisan prejudice.