KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S BORE

Is Donald Trump… OK? Rumors about his health are swirling. His years of lying and hiding his medical records have made it hard for him to quell the speculation.

• Back in the heady days of President Donald Trump’s first campaign, his team released a preposterous, over-the-top statement from one Dr. Harold Bornstein proclaiming Trump would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” That same Dr. Bornstein would later complain bitterly about a subsequent raid of his office by Trump’s goons, who nabbed Trump’s medical records and stashed them in some secret location. Trump himself, of course, had dictated the original overblown statement, Dr. Bornstein confessed.

• That bizarre episode is just one reason why so few people believed Trump’s assurance over the weekend that there is nothing wrong with his health, in the face of fizzing social media buzz that something is up. There is no well-founded reason for all of this concern. But Trump has shredded his own credibility with years of flagrant falsehoods and subterfuge — including the time when he was a lot more sick with COVID than the White House admitted. Why should anyone believe him now?

• Trump appeared, looking more or less his usual self, at a press conference in the White House this afternoon. He claimed to have no idea that the internet spent the weekend speculating that he was dead. “I didn't hear that one. That's pretty serious stuff,” he told reporters. “It’s so fake … No, I have been very active.”

• Internet sleuths have insisted there were reasons to think something was off, at least for a while last week. Trump didn’t speak directly to the press for days, though he normally chats with reporters at length. He canceled a vacation to his New Jersey golf resort. Pictures of his bruised hands and swollen ankles went viral, even drawing concern from ultra-MAGA freak Alex Jones. Trump looked rough while golfing over the weekend.

• The internet ate up the rumors: “I love how when Trump goes five days without openly violating the U.S. Constitution we just all assume he passed away,” tweeted a Liam Nissan parody account, which earned 200,000 likes and 3.7 million views.

Trump appears to be fine (or at least alive) right now. But such conspiracies could become the norm for the next *checks calendar* 1,236 days.

• Trump and Vice President JD Vance even seem to be playing into the drama. Earlier this month, Trump mused about his own likelihood of getting into heaven — and then used the comment as the subject line in a fundraising email. Vance, meanwhile, didn’t shy away from theorizing about the president’s demise.

• “Yes, things can always happen,” Vance told USA Today last week, when asked if he would be ready to become America’s leader if Trump died. “Yes, terrible tragedies happen. And 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.”

Another bizarre Trump conspiracy is brewing: Why did someone throw a black bag out of the White House’s second story window? Trump’s team says it was “regular maintenance”... on the same floor as the president’s private residence. Weird!

WHAT ELSE?

The Trump family amassed as much as $5 billion after launching a new cryptocurrency, which can now be purchased on the open market by anyone who wants to curry favor with the president in a shady kind of way. “This isn’t some memecoin, it’s the governance backbone of a real ecosystem changing how money moves,” Don Jr. tweeted. Reminder: Donald Trump owns many of these tokens, while former President Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid corruption accusations.

Trump’s team is considering a ludicrous plan to turn the decimated Gaza Strip into a high-end luxury resort, after the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians, according to a slide deck put together by a consulting firm and seen by the Washington Post. Landowners would be offered crypto to give up their property rights, and the token could be redeemed for an apartment in one of the territory’s new “AI-powered, smart cities.” We really are living in one extended “Black Mirror” episode now.

On that note, Americans no longer believe that hard work leads to building wealth, according to a new poll. There’s also new data showing that the middle class, which is usually categorized as households that make about $53,000 to $161,000 a year, is increasingly strapped for cash. And yet the first family makes $5 billion over the weekend by creating its own funny money? Yeah, no wonder folks are getting cynical!

Chinese leader Xi Jinping hung out in public with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un for the first time ever today. The trio is preparing for a military in Beijing tomorrow commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. It’s a bad look for Trump, who has sought to form relationships with all three leaders in recent years. I don’t think his invitation was lost in the mail…

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), 78, announced that he’s retiring because of his age. He recalled former President Joe Biden’s rough debate performance and noted that a younger successor may be more effective than him. “I'm not saying we should change over the entire party,” Nadler said. “But I think a certain amount of change is very helpful.” Cheers to Rep. Nadler for doing his part to take a stand against gerontocracy.

The population of the United States could shrink for the first time in the country’s entire history this year. How is that possible? Trump’s immigration policies could lead to less immigration and more deportations, outnumbering the natural increase in the population (births minus deaths), according to journalist Derek Thompson. The Pentagon recently authorized hundreds of its lawyers to temporarily serve as immigration judges to ramp up Trump’s anti-migrant agenda.

Light at the End of the Email…

A federal judge found that the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to quell protests in California was illegal. It’s a huge blow to Trump’s plans to deploy troops in other cities across the country.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the defunded parent company that supported PBS and NPR, will receive the Television Academy’s Governors Award. It’s one of TV’s top honors, for those who have “made a profound, transformational and long-lasting contribution to the arts and/or science of television.”

What’s the most capitalistic thing that Zohran Mamdani secretly enjoys? The democratic socialist and NYC mayoral hopeful answered that big question on a podcast… with Häagan-Dazs coffee ice cream. “Right out of the tub,” he clarified. Honestly, in a world where the president’s family is making billions by flipping crypto, scarfing ice cream sounds downright proletarian to me.