Is Trump OK?
Rumors of President Trump’s death swirled on social media over the weekend. He hadn’t been seen in public for a few days, and some viral photographs showed bruises on his hands. Katie Rogers, a White House correspondent, explains what happened:
Trump is definitely alive. He appeared yesterday in the Oval Office, where he took questions from reporters and announced plans to move the U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama.
Talk of his untimely demise peaked Saturday and then dipped Sunday, when he was spotted golfing in Virginia. “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE,” he wrote on Truth Social that day.
Trump, 79, was recently diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition that can cause swelling and pain. He also takes aspirin to reduce the risk of cardiac problems; White House officials blamed it for the mysterious bruising. Trump’s doctor wrote in July that he remained in excellent health. “For years, justifiable concerns and questions about Mr. Trump’s health have often been met with minimal explanation or obfuscation from the people around him,” Katie writes. “Mr. Trump’s physicians have not taken questions from reporters in years.”
There’s no reason to believe something sinister is happening. But many voters had the impression that President Biden and his allies hid his age-related decline, so the push for transparency now is not entirely mysterious.
Act of defiance
I write about Chinese society.
China has spent decades stamping out dissent, censoring the corners of the web where it lives and punishing the people who utter it. But last week, an activist in a city of 30 million people showed how hard it can be to silence all the haters. He didn’t just stage a protest; he also turned the tools of surveillance on the state. It was proof that defiance still existed, even in one of the world’s most surveilled places.
At 10 p.m. on Friday, a large projection on a building in Chongqing lit up the night with slogans calling for the end of Communist Party rule. “Only without the Communist Party can there be a new China,” read one. Another declared: “No more lies, we want the truth. No more slavery, we want freedom.”
The projection came from a nearby hotel. But when the police arrived 50 minutes later to shut it down, the activist was gone, and he’d left cameras behind. He soon released footage of officers fiddling with the projector. A handwritten letter addressed to the police was on the coffee table. “Even if you are a beneficiary of the system today, one day you will inevitably become a victim on this land,” said the letter, which the activist also circulated online.