Virality, and vengeance

A few weeks ago, I returned to Washington after visiting family in the Midwest, and was trying to catch up with some of the news I had blissfully missed when away.

Trump’s weekend schedule, distributed to the press by the White House, arrived in my in-box. I noticed that he did not have a single public appearance for the upcoming long Labor Day weekend, which seemed a bit odd—and a departure from his usual modus operandi.

Trump this term has used most any pretext – signing an executive order, cabinet meetings, world leader visits – to let the TV cameras in to show him presidenting; and he likes to be seen as a champion of American workers, which Labor Day would seemingly be an ideal opportunity to mark in some fashion. But he had nothing.

Then I noticed that the White House pool reports for that day, August 29th, a Friday, had not mentioned a sighting of Trump. And indeed the last pool report of the day said they had not lain eyes on the president all day.

It turned out that Trump had not made a public appearance since his epic over three-hour long televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday (Aug. 26), three days earlier. That clearly was a departure from Trump’s usual MO.

I posted a screen shot of Trump’s public weekend schedule to Twitter, noting he had no public appearances.

In the morning, when I woke up, the post had over 30 million views. And several of the responses and comments on it were to the effect of speculating, or joking, that maybe he had expired.

It was a bit frightening. It had never occurred to me that anyone would think Trump was not alive. I had wondered to myself if perhaps he had had a medical issue, or perhaps it was nothing. I thought the post would be a marker and in the future we might get more information—or quite possibly, not.

What accounted for the virality of the tweet? I don’t know. Another person had posted it in a Tik tok video. Bots? Algorithms?

I am not a newbie to Twitter, now X, much degraded since its purchase by Elon Musk. I have built a following there of people like me mostly interested in news, especially on foreign policy and the Middle East. But that kind of insane, seemingly juiced-up virality, is not something I