The sudden disappearance of presidential age and fitness as an issue

The last time I issued to NPR voluntarily, the infamously irritating station manager/pundit interrupted his obsessive coverage of Hillary Clinton’s EMAILS to undergo a total meltdown over Hillary briefly getting sick during the campaign, at one point ranting about how Joe Biden was probably going to have to be the nominee. It’s largely forgotten in the wake of the Comey letter, but his unhinged coverage of Pneumoniaghazi was far from unique:

The question of Joe Biden’s age and fitness is more complicated because it was certainly a real story — the question as always is one of proportion and double standards.

With Trump looking awful and making fewer public appearances, you would think that the political press would be all over the question of the fitness of the oldest person ever to hold the presidency at this point of his term. As Garrett Graff observes, this very much isn’t happening:

If you haven’t been paying attention, Washington and social media have spent Labor Day weekend in a frenzy over Donald Trump’s health. The president, who seems like he can’t stomach staying out of the public eye and spotlight for even a few hours, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday — nor any over the long weekend. That’s an unusually long period of time out of public view. Searches for “Is Trump dead?” soared on Google Saturday and became one of the most-searched terms of the holiday weekend, and #whereistrump trended on other social media sites.

After he was glimpsed from a distance by the White House press pool leaving to golf on Saturday, social media Carrie Mathisons picked apart his golf photos wondering whether the White House was circulating old photos of the president on the links. Uncharacteristically, during the golf outing, he never even wandered up to the press pool to rant or rave about recent world headlines. Illinois governor JB Pritzker trolled Trump by demanding a proof-of-life photo. On Sunday, group chats around the capital lit up with a 31-tweet-long thread by a crypto investor named Adam Cochran alleging that Trump was in ill health. This morning, the press corps was kept about 100 yards from the president.

The speculation wasn’t helped by a series of strange answers J.D. Vance gave in a USA Today interview last week, where he said he was ready to be president if needed: “I’ve gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the last 200 days.” Maybe that’s just Vance being awkward and strange — it’s hard to think of any subject where Vance giving an interview has helped — but Trump himself (or someone on his social media accounts) also engaged with the speculation by posting a “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE” post on Truth Social, which might rank second only this weekend to Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre car accident for raising more questions than it answered.

“Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes and memes have abounded, but this morning, there’s not a single story on the homepage of the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or CNN about Trump’s health — but there is a story on the New York Post about how robust the president’s health surely is! (One of the few very good treatments of the subject in recent days has come from Public Notice.)

One of my running themes of media criticism in the Trump era has been that the national media knows all-too-well how to provide wall-to-wall coverage and elevate something from a “news story” to a “news event.” (Think Hunter Biden or Hillary’s emails!) It’s very clear — at least so far — that Trump’s health is not a news “event,” but what’s even more puzzling is the extent to which the national media doesn’t even treat it as a news “story.” As Public Notice wrote, “It’s shocking that since July, no major news outlets have done serious investigations about Trump’s health and what the White House is trying to cover up about it.”

It’s long past time we had a serious conversation about Trump’s increasingly puzzling health questions and apparent mental decline.  

Like Graff, all kidding aside I have no idea what’s going on. Maybe Trump just has a really bad cold or something. But if a Democrat was in the White House there is no way the coverage wouldn’t currently be landing somewhere on the news-story-to-news-event continuum. Graff lists six reasons why this should be major news — the bruised hands, the changes to his normally very predictable routine, the constant lies and cover-ups about his health, Trump’s obviously diminished capacity, Trump’s swollen ankles, and the Biden precedent. The first five make it an obvious story; the last one makes this a story about what the national press refused to cover about Trump and why.

Incidentally, the NYT’s chief Presidential Age Correspondent last had a byline on April 18, for natch a Cletus Safari story. Is he drawing his full salary to just tweet occasionally about the Premier League? Maybe he’s helping Jake Tapper with a book about Trump’s age that will come out in 2029.