US media quickly forced to revisit a thorny question: How should a
president's health be covered?
[September 03, 2025]
By DAVID BAUDER
Early in Donald Trump's news conference Tuesday, Fox News' Peter Doocy
asked a question that surely baffled people who avoided social media for
Labor Day.
“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” Doocy said
to the president.
Doocy was referring to speculation about Trump's health that spread
online during the long Labor Day weekend, fueled in part by the
president's relative absence from the public for several days. The
incident has renewed — for a different president — questions about how
journalists should handle the sensitive issue of how healthy an aging
leader of the free world actually is.
Trump said he was more active than had been apparent publicly and
criticized the media. “It's fake news — it's so fake,” he said. “That's
why the media has so little credibility.”
It's a familiar issue with the news media and two aging presidents
A year ago, President Joe Biden, now 82, abandoned his reelection effort
after a halting, confused performance in a debate with Trump provoked
concerns about his ability to serve another four-year term. Journalists
who covered the White House faced attacks for not doing enough to
investigate Biden's health and condition.
Trump, who turned 79 in June, is the oldest person to be inaugurated as
president. Pictures showing him with bruises on his hands and apparent
swelling in his legs circulated online recently, as did clips of
misstatements in public, such as mistakenly referring to Michigan Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer last month as “Kristi.”
None of these is evidence of serious illness.
The White House has said Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous
insufficiency, which means veins in the legs can’t properly carry blood
back to the heart, causing it to pool in the lower legs. It’s a fairly
common condition for older adults.
As far as the bruising, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s from
“frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin,” which Trump takes
regularly to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. Easy bruising
in general could have several relatively benign causes, including old
age or side effects from medications like blood thinners.
Besides creating spikes in online activity through sites like X,
Facebook and TikTok, stories speculating about Trump's health appeared
in outlets like The Hill, the New York Post, People, Rolling Stone, Raw
Story and Breitbart in recent days, according to NewsWhip.
But outlets like The New York Times, The Associated Press, MSNBC and Fox
News Channel did not write about it or discuss it, at least prior to the
issue being brought up at Trump's news conference.
‘Trump is dead’ was trending on social media
On CNN Tuesday morning, anchor Audie Cornish had a short discussion
about the topic. “At one point the term ‘Trump is dead’ was trending on
social media," Cornish said. “Not true.” She noted one of Trump's social
media posts from Labor Day, when he wrote, “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY
LIFE.”
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President Donald Trump speaks during an event about the relocation
of U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama in the
Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025, in
Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
 On the conservative outlet Newsmax,
anchor Rick Leventhal read a series of social media messages about
the issue. “The left did not hesitate to take to social media
sending ill will the president's way,” he said.
After Trump's 50-minute Oval Office appearance, televised in full on
Fox News, network anchor Martha MacCallum laughed at a reference to
the issue. “Biden was missing in action for days or weeks,” she
said.
Trump sought to make his predecessor's condition an issue both
before and after voters returned him to the presidency. In June,
Trump ordered an investigation into Biden's use of the autopen for
presidential signatures and whether his aides purposely shielded the
public from evidence of Biden's physical and mental decline.
In part because of that, former NBC “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck
Todd said in a podcast Tuesday that Trump and his team had only
themselves to blame for the way the president's health became an
issue. “I do think they're susceptible to a feeding frenzy,” he
said.
Beyond punditry, however, news outlets face serious questions about
how to handle the story, much like they did with Biden. The physical
signs that have been pointed out online should trigger serious
probes into the president's health. Some critics, like historian
Garrett Graff, said it was puzzling that many in the media hadn't
treated it like a news story — although the timing over a holiday
weekend surely made it more challenging.
What is fair game for news media to cover?
“Evidence-based assessments of a president's health are absolutely
fair game,” said Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University journalism
professor. That could include observations like the president's
bruising or falling asleep at meetings, and analyses of what drugs
the president is taking and why.
“Similarly, radio silence from a prominent office holder, especially
one who appears on media frequently, is a valuable thing for
journalists to report,” Grueskin said. “I don't think that news
organizations need to publish those ‘everyone is talking about XYZ
on social media, so we need to repeat it’ stories.”
The issue of press coverage of Biden's health was widely discussed
last year, and renewed again this spring with the publication of
“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His
Disastrous Choice to Run Again” by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex
Thompson.
Given all that, Graff wrote in a Substack post that “you'd think
reporters would be falling all over themselves to dig deeper right
now. Clearly, there's enough smoke to warrant at least a major story
in a major outlet investigating whether there is fire.”
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