‘Is Trump dead?’ trending on social media: here’s why the rumour is lighting up the internet

For a man who loves to be in front of the cameras, go off-script, threaten countries with tariffs and war, rant about the ‘Woke Leftist Radicals’, and invent words such as ‘equalise’, not seeing Donald Trump for three days is starting to put the internet on edge.

The online whirlwind of social media appears to have added various pieces of ‘information’ — true or not, but when has that stopped anyone? — together and arrived at the conclusion that the President of the United States has passed away.

Bruises on his hand, not being seen, reports of an empty schedule, and JD Vance’s weird comments about what he’d be prepared to do ‘should the worst happen’, have seemingly yielded the conclusion that the President, born in the 1940s, has died.

Twitter is a strange place. After being purchased by Elon Musk, Trump’s ex-BFF, the social media platform has turned into something of a hellscape, with rampant right-wing propaganda flying in every direction, sandwiched between NSFW videos and ads about buying blue ticks.

But the people remain, and they’re worried about Trump. Or is it manifesting?

While pinning down the origin of a social media rumour is about as easy as using a pencil to pin down a curious piranha aboard a wobbly Amazonian river boat, the biggest recent push of the rumour seems to have come from a Mr. John Ganz. The Twitter user, with more than 50,000 followers, posted on August 30 that "Trump is dead. He died on Wednesday." While there is no proof whatsoever of this, the tweet quickly picked up in popularity — at the time of writing, it has close to 7 million views.”

"He wasn’t seen today. He has no public events scheduled this weekend"

The apparent lack of public appearances is also fuelling the fire, as is his deafening lack of social media posts. Perhaps the only avid user of Truth Social, Trump has regularly taken to his mobile phone to rant about everything from celebrity news to international conflict.

Charlotte Clymer, a politics writer with over 350,000 followers, wrote: "Trump wasn’t seen yesterday by the White House press pool. He wasn’t seen today. He has no public events scheduled this weekend. Trump hasn’t been seen in public since Weds, and it’s unclear if he’ll be seen in public until Tues. That’s pretty damn weird."

Vance brings up “terrible tragedy” out of nowhere

And then there’s JD Vance. The VP recently told USA Today that Trump is "the last person making phone calls at night, and he’s the first person who wakes up and the first person making phone calls in the morning."

That’s all very normal, but then he said this: “Yes, terrible tragedies happen. But I feel very confident the president of the United States is in good shape, is going to serve out the remainder of his term and do great things for the American people. 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.”

Of course, such random comments about ‘terrible tragedies’ have caused the question to be asked: why on Earth did you say that? However, that question seems to be the only requirement to become president these days, so I’d say Vance has passed with flying colours.

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