Trump Is Dying

The Walter Reed Lie, for the 100th Time

This post is brought to you free by Incogni.

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.

Sure, it’s fun to speculate on what we’ll all do when The Day arrives, but Trump’s death isn’t just physical.

But more importantly, more lastingly, he is dying as a force in our politics, as a presence in our culture, and as the dark gravitational center of the American right. The only people who can’t see it are the ones whose paychecks depend on pretending the corpse is still doing pirouettes and burpees.

The man’s own physician diagnosed him last summer with chronic venous insufficiency, the swollen-ankles, blood-pools-in-the-legs condition you generally see in your great-aunt who needs the recliner kicked up before Wheel of Fortune. He has been photographed, repeatedly, with hand bruises the size and color of rotten plums, slathered in concealer that doesn’t quite take. The official explanation is “frequent handshaking and aspirin.”

Of course. Every septuagenarian I know who shakes hands has a hand that looks like he caught it in the door of a Buick.

Then there’s the gait. The slowing shuffle to Marine One. The right-handed lean. The drifting into associative word-salad that, on Biden, would have launched a thousand Fox News chyrons in sixty seconds.

He has become, there is no way to say this without saying it, MAGA…doddering. Unsteady. Tired. A man whose physical envelope is visibly insufficient for the job he claims to be doing.

Evil ages you. Sin rests as heavy as lead on the bones. Cruelty and malice corrupt and destroy their bearers. You can see it in him now, the way you could see it in Mobutu, in Mugabe, in the gangsters of history who used the state as a punishment and piggy bank for too long.

Compare this with the saturation coverage of Biden’s decline to the lullaby around Trump’s.

When Biden trailed off, it was a three-day national emergency: cable hits, op-eds, anonymous-source pieces about West Wing concern. The 25th Amendment got more name-checks in 2024 than the Bill of Rights got in a decade.

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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.

Which brings us to the ballroom, the arch, the White House glitter bukkake redecoration, the urgent desire to slap his name on every flat surface. Add those out-of-touch moments to the pardons, the no-bid contracts, the crypto scams, the $1.7 billion slush fund, and the snake-pit of grift the second term has become.

The conventional read is that this is power…the dictator phase, the strongman unleashed.

I want to suggest the opposite. Strongmen at the height of their game don’t need the ballroom. They don’t need to rename the Kennedy Center after themselves. They don’t need the gold leaf, the fake portraits, the rebranded monuments and memorials.

That’s the behavior of a man who knows the clock is running and is grabbing what he can while the grabbing is good. That’s Marcos in Manila in 1985. That’s Ceausescu in 1988, before he and the missus were lined up against a wall.

Genuine power doesn’t need to be advertised this loudly. The frantic, escalating, almost pornographic self-celebration is the tell. It’s a confession in plain sight. The man building his mausoleum while he’s still alive is the man who knows he’s running out of road.

So here we are. A 79-year-old man, swollen of extremity and bruised of hand, looking like the victim of a zombie bite by denying it until he turns, shuffling between Walter Reed and a half-built ballroom nobody asked for, with an approval rating in free fall, a base finally asking quiet questions about grocery prices, a press corps too cowed to say out loud what they all know, and a clock, biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot bully into stopping.

He is not coming back from this. There is no third act. There is only the long, undignified, makeup-smeared decline of a man and a movement whose moment has passed, narrating itself ever more loudly into an ever emptier hall, a frowzy barfly of a man, replaying past glories that never happened and hoping you won’t notice the bad wig.

Trump is dying.

Say it out loud. It will feel strange the first time. Less strange the second. By the tenth, you’ll wonder why it took the rest of the press corps so long to catch up.

And yes, when The Day comes, I promise you that my better angels will be taking PTO.

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