Maybe you do, indeed, have to hand it to Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. The White House correspondent, who former President Joe Biden famously described on a hot mic as a “stupid son of a b***h,” did not shy away from a topic that much of the media — mainstream and right-wing, alike — had previously avoided: Donald Trump’s apparently declining health.
“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” Doocy asked the president during a press availability on Tuesday. After an hours-long Cabinet meeting on Aug. 26, Trump took a week-long break from public appearances — his longest hiatus since taking office. The president’s lack of visibility and interactions with the press, odd for someone who thrives on being seen and heard, led social media users to question if he had died or if he was physically in decline. They focused on images of Trump’s swollen ankles, puffy face, unsteady gait and a bruised hand, which still appeared to be discolored during Tuesday’s Oval Office event. He was eventually forced to respond, writing on Truth Social on Labor Day, “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE.”
Tuesday’s presser — which was announced late on Labor Day, after the online chatter had reached a fevered crescendo despite furtive sightings from the White House press pool on Saturday, Sunday and Monday at Trump’s golf club in Sterling, Va. — felt very much like a panicked proof of life event. Still, Trump pretended to not understand the commotion.
“People didn’t see you for a couple of days. One-point-three million user engagements as of Saturday morning about your demise,” Doocy informed Trump. Tuesday’s presser — which was announced late on Labor Day, after the online chatter had reached a fevered crescendo despite furtive sightings from the White House press pool on Saturday, Sunday and Monday at Trump’s golf club in Sterling, Va. — felt very much like a panicked proof of life event. Still, Trump pretended to not understand the commotion. “No, I’ve been very active actually over the weekend. I didn’t hear that one. That’s pretty serious. Well, it’s fake news. You know, it’s just so, it’s so fake. That’s why the media has so little credibility.”
The guy who normalized age-based mockery is now suffering from the mirror’s glare.
Later on Tuesday, Doocy explained to Fox News host Jesse Watters that he “was getting a bunch of text messages from people concerned about the president’s health” over the weekend. “I tried to come up with the most direct question possible.”
According to the Associated Press, Trump’s absence and concerns about his health were not covered by much of the mainstream press before Fox News brought the online conspiracy theories right to Trump’s doorsteps. Few other Trump-friendly outlets dared touch the subject. The right-wing Breitbart collected reactions from Trump’s supporters to what they described as “leftist fantasies about the president’s demise.” Newsmax anchor Rick Leventhal, a former Fox News reporter, read a series of social media messages on the topic. “The left did not hesitate to take to social media sending ill will the president’s way,” he said. “That’s ageism,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham declared. But Alex Jones, far from a leftist, warned that Trump’s “cankles” — swollen ankles the White House physician has attributed to chronic venous insufficiency — could lead to an imminent “collapse” within the next year. He compared Trump’s condition to “a light bulb starting to go out,” citing fluctuations in energy and cognition. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in July that Trump had been diagnosed with CVI, and that his bruises were the result of “frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin.”
Trump’s wingman also fueled the weekend speculation. “If, God forbid, there’s a terrible tragedy, I can’t think of better on-the-job training than what I’ve gotten over the last 200 days,” Vice President J.D. Vance told USA Today on Aug. 28.
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When he was inaugurated on Jan. 20, Trump became the oldest person to assume the presidency. Should he stay in office for his full four-year term, Trump will break Biden’s record as the oldest serving president. Now, as his own body language and absences trigger doubt, the groundwork laid by his brutal attacks on the former president is amplifying the fallout.
On Friday, for instance, just before the online chatter began picking up, Trump announced in an interview with The Daily Caller plans to substitute an image of the autopen with a portrait of Biden in the White House. Trump has long mocked Biden’s health problems — amplifying baseless conspiracy theories about the former president using “body doubles,” accusing him of hiding his cancer diagnosis and deploying a $6.5 million campaign ad buy that claimed Biden lacked “the strength, the stamina and the mental fortitude to lead this country.”
By aggressively framing age as a proxy for fitness, Trump invited the scrutiny he is now facing. That feedback loop continues. The media is now wrestling with how to cover presidential health responsibly after being accused by the right of ignoring concerns about Biden’s health while he was in office. The script appears to have flipped. Trump is now failing his own MAGA test, where fitness for office equals physical robustness.
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The president’s short-sightedness of casting age as a litmus test for competence has led to an inadvertent consequence: He has no ability to lie his way out of it, as he tried to do about another conspiracy theory Doocy asked him to account for on Tuesday. Asked about the viral video in which someone appears to throw a large trash bag out an upper window of the White House, Trump insisted that it’s “got to be fake” before suggesting that “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame AI.”
“I know every window up there,” he told Doocy. “The last place I’d be doing it is that, because there’s cameras all over the place, right?…I’ve never seen a window that’s — in fact, my wife was complaining about it the other day, she said, ‘Love to have a little fresh air come in,’ but you can’t, they’re bulletproof. And number one, they’re sealed, and number two, each window weighs about 600 pounds, you’d have to be pretty strong to open them up.” As social media users also pointed out, former First Lady Michelle Obama, in a 2015 appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” seemed to complain about not being able to open windows in the White House residence: “The windows in our house don’t open.”
Trump asked Doocy where the window was, at which point the reporter approached the dais and showed the president the video on his phone. “And one of the problems we have with AI, it’s both good and bad,” Trump replied. “If something happens really bad, just blame AI. But also they create things, you know?”
This world of conspiracy theories and misinformation is a weapon of his own making. Now it’s a double-edged sword that Trump has to confront and handle in his own home.
