President Donald Trump’s political success was derived in part by being omnipresent on every screen. So his recent absence from public view provoked all sorts of speculation C fed by social media algorithms that promoted conspiracy theories and complete nonsense to huge numbers of people.
“TRUMP DEAD” became a trending topic over the long Labor Day weekend, fueled, perhaps, by liberal wishful thinking and online influencer boredom. Seeing a chance to cash in on the trend, content creators with no real information about Trump’s health began to post speculative items about a possible injury or surgery.
The viral storm was best summarized through the posts of one self-proclaimed psychic with more than 125,000 followers on TikTok. “Trump is actually going to die on the 28th of August,” she predicted in one video last week, before plugging a beauty product.
Photos showed Trump leaving the White House to visit one of his golf courses on August 30, but that didn’t dissuade the psychic. In between other profit-making product promotions, she insisted she was right, and questioned the validity of the photos.
She was far from the only one. Searching for Trump’s name on TikTok resulted in related searches for “is trump dead or no” and “trump health symptoms.” Some of the video makers appeared to be asking earnestly about the president’s well-being, while others appeared to be acting mischievously, sowing confusion for political or financial reasons.
As with so many conspiracy theories, this one started with some crumbs of truth, including visible bruises on Trump’s hand. “More and more questions are being raised about Donald Trump’s health,” Democratic content creator Harry Sisson said in a video last week, zooming in on Trump’s hands from different angles.
Then, as CNN’s Betsy Klein reported, “Trump’s public schedule went uncharacteristically dark” last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Some Trump opponents turned into investigators, posting unflattering photos of the president and highlighting his recent comments about wanting to “get to Heaven if possible” while advancing a theory that he was secretly sick. What happened next was a snowball effect C as small stray details were subsumed into a big imagined coverup by the White House.
That fervor consumed X, TikTok and other social media over the weekend. But the online energy was especially intense on Bluesky. Many anti-Trump users who were repelled by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, gravitated to Bluesky as an alternative, and the site’s algorithm surfaced posts from users who fantasized about Trump passing away.
The is-Trump-dead chatter felt all-consuming on Friday night, with people sharing jokes and memes of people dancing on a grave that didn’t actually exist.
David Doyen, executive editor of The American Prospect, referred to Trump’s plans for a ballroom to be built at the White House and said, “The ballroom… it’s a mausoleum!”
A popular liberal influencer known as JoJo From Jerz observed the torrent of posts and wrote, “Live your life in such a way that half the internet doesn’t start planning block parties when they think you’re dead.”
What’s driving the conspiracy theories
The incentives were clear: Memes and jokes at Trump’s expense were rewarded with clicks, shares and replies, in much the same way that MAGA media figures are incentivized to celebrate every move Trump makes.
By Saturday, when Trump was seen by reporters and photographers, Democratic politicians started to dabble in the health speculation, knowing that it would garner attention.
When Trump insulted Illinois governor JB Pritzker in a Truth Social post, Pritzker shot back on social media, “Why don’t you send everyone proof of life first?”
Conservatives on X criticized Pritzker for doing so, citing the assassination attempts against Trump in 2024.
Over the weekend, as online sleuths scoured photos of Trump for evidence of any frailty, the political scientist Ian Bremmer pointed out that obsessive scrutiny of a leader’s health is a hallmark of authoritarian countries.
“So many times,” he wrote on X, the internet “has gone wild with the Putin is dead and Xi is dead rumors.”
That it’s now happening with Trump “says a lot more about the state of mistrust in information and institutions in the United States than it does about the health of the president,” Bremmer wrote.
Former President Joe Biden also faced significant scrutiny from the media about his health. But he was far less accessible to the media and made fewer public appearances than Trump has been.
That may have fueled stories from many news outlets acknowledging the online hubbub and offering facts about Trump’s weekend plans.
But perhaps those stories were a whole lot less interesting C and to Trump antagonists, less satisfying C than the rampant misinformation on platforms like X.
Users hoping for Trump’s death, and others denouncing those users as ghouls, filled up X’s “trending” pages, creating an enormous amount of monetizable content for social media platforms C but very little tangible benefit for the public.
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