History Rhymes: Trump Death Watch Reveals Ugly Truth About Aging Presidents and Partisan Hacks

(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Mark Twain famously wrote that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. When he wrote that, he probably wasn’t thinking in terms of a year or two. And yet here we are: another aging president, another weekend consumed by baseless rumors about his health, another round of gleeful partisan finger-pointing.

Over the holiday, online conspiracies claimed President Donald Trump was gravely ill or even dead. It was nonsense, the sort of fact-free whisper campaign that metastasizes in the social media bloodstream. Trump himself denied the rumors, insisting he hadn’t heard them — though anyone who has worked around him knows he was well aware.

If this partisan-cum-ageist attack feels remarkably familiar, that’s because it is. Conservatives just spent the past four years mocking Joe Biden as a nursing-home escapee, pointing and laughing at his stiffness, his stumbles, and his verbal detours. Every awkward pause became a Fox News chyron, every misstep a meme. To his defenders, it was cruel and condescending; to his critics, it was proof he was unfit. And as Biden’s decline became more visible and arguably a serious threat to a functioning Executive Branch, the defenses thinned out, even as the mockery became less about governance and more about dunking.

Now the pendulum has swung at a pace one doesn’t see outside of turbo-charged pendulums. Biden is out, Trump is back in, and impossibly, the very same script is being performed by the other side. Liberals, once so indignant about cheap shots at an older president, now revel in Trump’s halting speech or strange social media posts. They speculate about his stamina, his health, even his survival. Suddenly it’s the right that finds such talk tasteless, beneath serious politics.

In an MSNBC segment that aired Tuesday night, former Press Secretary Jen Psaki, whose job it was to defend her former boss from these sort of partisan attacks, kinda sorta did the very same thing targeting Trump. Yes it was more nuanced and focused on polling, but if you did a find and replace of the names in the transcript, it would read very similar to a Jesse Watters segment on Fox News from two years ago.

History rhymes — with a canned laugh track that aims to signal the humor, but ends up revealing a lack of it, and ends up feeling sort of tragic.

This isn’t just hypocrisy, though it is certainly that. It’s a byproduct of America’s gerontocracy. When both parties nominate leaders in their late seventies or eighties, they all but guarantee that questions of age and capacity will dominate. Decline is inevitable; frailty is part of the human condition. And in a political culture fueled by snark, everyone is tempted to treat that decline not with seriousness but with glee.

The tragedy is that voters deserve better. The health of a president isn’t just another partisan cudgel; it’s a matter of national security and governance. Yet the discourse around it has devolved into a sideshow. Presidents aren’t judged by the wisdom of their decisions but by whether they tripped on a stair. We’ve turned the presidency into the world’s most dangerous reality show, where the big reveal isn’t a policy initiative but a medical report.

The story here isn’t the rumor itself, but the way each side flips from outrage to schadenfreude depending on whose ox is gored.

We’re watching the same movie on a loop, only the casting changes. And we in the media, who ought to know better, are too busy cutting clips for engagement to ask why a country of 330 million keeps elevating leaders who would be more at home in a retirement community than on the world stage.

This weekend’s Trump death watch wasn’t really about Trump. It was about us. About our willingness to indulge the spectacle. About our inability to separate the legitimate question of a leader’s capacity from the thrill of mocking their age.

And it will happen again. Trump is not as diminished as Biden was by the end of his term, but he isn’t getting younger. This rumor won’t be the last. As his presidency grinds on, health speculation will become a recurring subplot, and the hypocrisy Olympics will continue. Liberals will gloat. Conservatives will feign outrage. Then, when the roles are reversed again, so will the reactions.

Jonah Goldberg nailed this dynamic with a characteristically dry aside: “Lots of folks now taking offense at fact-light speculation about a very old president who often looks bad and says weird stuff absolutely loved speculating about the last very old president who looked bad and said weird stuff… Maybe the long term lesson is that we should stop electing very old presidents who say weird stuff.”

That may be too sensible a conclusion for our current politics. But at the very least, we could admit that the endless dunking on presidential decline says less about Biden or Trump than it does about the rest of us. We’re the ones who keep laughing at the rhyme, even when the joke’s on us.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.