The online hysteria over Trump’s health should have been roundly condemned, not treated as a quirky viral cultural event.

A constant irritation for the American political writer is that there exist so many profane, discipline-specific epithets for which there are no polite alternatives.

The pundit or reporter is therefore left to rely on watered-down stand-ins — say, “dirty trickster” — that just don’t convey the true picture. We see similar failures of language and tone whenever the press covers the left-wing fringe, a failure so common and dependable as to be intentional.

Why do reporters willingly understate left-wing lunacy of the highest degree? The answer is simple: The corporate press’s greatest flaw is its willingness to believe the worst of its enemies and the best of its friends.

Which brings us to the Donald death-watch hysteria.

A family member remarked last weekend that she heard President Trump had died. Neither my sister-in-law nor I had any idea what this was about, but we soon found our answer. The more deranged and self-harming corners of left-wing social media evidently decided that the president had died and that the public was being kept in the dark. The conspiracy theory went viral, escaping the echo chambers of X etc. and landing in the laps of nonpolitical types such as my family member.

Trump is not dead, by the way.

By any objective standard, this trending topic was completely batty. It’s ridiculous that anyone believed the president had quietly died and that “influencers” somehow knew about it, in spite of the White House’s supposed efforts to hide “the truth.” It’s crazier that these rantings crossed over into civil discourse.

It’s also deeply annoying that the left’s obviously alarming behavior will once again escape the scrutiny that the media traditionally apply to similarly alarming delusions from the far right.

After a weekend of left-wing zealots’ convincing themselves (and those caught in the blast radius) of a White House–wide conspiracy involving a secretly dead president, the response from the press has been little more than a grin and a mirthful, “You rascals!”

“President Trump Is Alive. The Internet Was Convinced Otherwise,” reported the New York Times.

The report presented the narrative in a strangely sympathetic tone: “President Trump had nothing on his public schedule for three days last week. He is often sporting a large, purple bruise on his right hand, which he sometimes slathers with makeup. His ankles are swollen. He is the oldest person to be elected president . . . [and] he has long declined to explain when and why he has sought out medical care, whether he was suffering from Covid or undergoing routine procedures.”

“For years, justifiable concerns and questions about Mr. Trump’s health have often been met with obfuscation or minimal explanation from the people around him,” the Times added. “Mr. Trump’s physicians have not taken questions from reporters in years, and there were no medical briefings held after an assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., last summer.”

No, Trump isn’t dead. But can you blame them for thinking he was?

In other corners of the news and entertainment business, certain members of the pundit class, including MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, further rationalized the theory’s spread.

“Look,” said the former White House press secretary, who claims, to this day, that she knew nothing of former President Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline, “we may never know why Donald Trump suddenly spent a week hiding entirely from the American public, but you don’t actually need baseless online conspiracies to explain why he might not want to show his face in public right now.”

For the record, Psaki’s former boss once went a full 239 days without holding a solo press conference. Naturally, this overlapped with his 577 days of vacation.

Elsewhere, New York magazine launched a live-tracker, which is being regularly updated, titled, “What’s the Deal With Trump’s Hand Bruise and Health Issues?”

The article attempts to ask, and answer, among other things: How long has Trump had this hand bruise? What did Trump say about the bruise? How did the White House explain Trump’s hand-bruising? Is Trump’s bruise always in the same place? How long has Trump been putting makeup on his hand? What’s going on with Trump’s ankles? What happened with those red marks on Trump’s hand? How did Trump reveal his chronic venous insufficiency diagnosis? What is chronic venous insufficiency? Is chronic venous insufficiency fatal? What treatment is Trump being given? What’s the latest news on Trump’s health? Is Trump still covering up the hand bruise?

Imagine a scenario where New York magazine responded to the Comet pizza affair with a live-ticker of child sex-trafficking cases, as a way to somehow give substance to the perpetrator’s delusions.

The soft-pedaling of the left’s love affair with conspiracy theories is probably a small thing compared with the actual proliferation of those theories on social media — but it’s still annoying! It’s one of the more pronounced examples of how media standards are applied unevenly. For a press that is usually quick to condemn quackery, conspiracy-mongering, and disinformation from the right, it sure seems reluctant to utter a cross word about any of these things when they come from the left.

Compare the Times’ coverage to how it covered a similar conspiracy regarding Biden in 2024. Back then, the paper, with several wags of a scolding finger, reported, “Far Right Spreads Baseless Claims About Biden’s Whereabouts.” It added with a note of indignant defensiveness, “President Biden, who has been sidelined with Covid, is set to address the nation this week.”

This is to say nothing of the Times’ earlier efforts to quash reasonable and obviously justified questions about Biden’s deterioration while in office. This effort included mainstreaming the Biden White House’s ludicrous “cheapfakes” narrative. (Relatedly: Axios’s Alex Thompson reported that a “fairly senior person” in the Biden administration once remarked that they “could not believe” reporters actually promoted the obviously contrived “cheapfakes” defense.)

This industry has dedicated an enormous amount of time and resources over the past decade to reporting on and supposedly combating disinformation, bogus narratives, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. Entirely made-up news beats were created for the occasion, with newsrooms such as NBC News and the Washington Post bestowing upon badly prepared staffers the title of “disinformation reporter.” Millions of words and thousands of hours of television programming have been devoted to the topic of falsehoods and hoaxes.

When it’s QAnon or any other weird flavor of right-coded crankery, major media are Johnny-on-the-spot with soliloquies about how now, more than ever, we need Truth.

Yet these same people rarely, if ever, seem to treat with the same level of alarm and seriousness (and contempt) the BlueAnon quacks who believe in such things as secret presidential deaths, faked assassination attempts, and Kremlin presidencies. Instead of outright denunciations and demands for a “national conversation” about the dangers of the information ecosystem in the digital era, we’re treated to a round of news stories that loosely translate to, They’re wrong, but they have a point.

Ten years after Trump’s political ascent, it seems evident that the press’s sense of urgency regarding conspiracies and hoaxes was only ever intended to suffocate the right and those in its orbit. The entire discourse has been a put-on, cloaked in the righteousness of safeguarding the truth.

It’s a sham of such obviously shameless proportions as to make even the worst “dirty trickster” blush.