Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: Trump’s Health Questions Won’t Go Away

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Tim Miller joined Chris Hayes to discuss how Donald Trump’s long absence sparked wild online rumors about his health — even claims he was dead. Watch All In With Chris Hayes: https://www.msnbc.com/all

Hey, everybody, Tim Mow from the Bullwark. I just got off MSNBC with Chris Hayes and Jamel Bowie, and we talked about what else, the rumors about Donald Trump's health that were going around this weekend. And what was behind those and why did they proliferate and what that says about our society? It was actually a fun little chat. And I think that there were some insights I haven't got into in other places on this. I was going to wear a costume. And I was encouraged quite.

full-throatedly by managing editor Sam Stein to wear a costume on the Chris Hayes show, but I whipped out. So I explained on the show what I was going to wear, so you can stick around for that on the other side. I think that our discussion is, you know, there's some chuckles about the whole thing. But I also think there's something ominous underneath about living in a society where this kind of thing happens and what that says about what kind of society we are. So stick around for that. Subscribe to the feed.

Tell your friends, do all the things. Comment. Let me let you think about my outfit. Whatever, so you want. We'll see on the other side. We've got a lot more coming on this page soon. How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead? You see that?

No. People didn't see you for a couple days. 1.3 million user engagements as of Saturday morning about your demise. Really? I didn't hear it. You know, I have heard it's sort of crazy. but last week I did numerous news conferences, all successful. They went very well, like this is going very well.

And then I didn't do any for two days, and they said there must be something wrong with him. There you have it. The President of the United States is alive and, well, his typical self. But while the online speculation over the long weekend turned out to be just that, the growing curiosity about Trump's well-being might be at least a bit understandable, considering that this White House has not given us any reason to trust what it says on just about anything. especially when it comes to the health of a man who is the oldest to ever take the oath of office. Jamel Bowie is an opinion columnist from New York Times.

Tim Miller is a former spokesman for the R&C, now a writer at large for the bulwark, and they join me now. Tim, I found that I mostly did stay off social media this weekend, but the times where I sort of managed to dip in, I was like, wait, what's going on? Did I miss something? Did actually something happened? and why do you think there is this sort of phenomenon that has been gathering force recently?

Yeah, I thought about wearing my white lab coat for this segment, Chris, but I decided not to. I think that this phenomenon is based around a few things. One, Donald Trump is extremely, extremely old, and so people have speculation about them. I think that number two, as you alluded to, they lie about everything, and I think that his last medical report,

reports that he weighed. He had the physique of Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, I'm pretty sure, as far as height and weight is concerned. And so they lie about his health. And so when you have things like weird bruises on your hands and huge cancels and you're not in public for 48 hours, you know, in a different administration in the Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush administration, they would have provided a statement and people would have believed them, right? And they don't, this administration, you can't do that. So I think that's another reason things got out of get out of hand and um you know look he the only thing uh i have one maybe agreement with alex jones maybe a disagreement with some viewers on this point but the one other thing that

drives this is trump does have an insane schedule and he has a very very public schedule it's not like he's a coal miner or whatever he's not it's not a physical job but he's a 79 year old man who's out talking like five hours a day in front of cameras and and and traveling internationally if you've ever traveled to the senior citizen internationally do you think when they land they're going to do a two-hour press conference, like, you know, so he keeps a very intense schedule, and then he went away for three days, and I think he was probably worn out, and I think that led to the speculation. Separate and apart from Trump, I find the centrality of the president to everything we think about American politics, to be not good, to be actually kind of one of the things that

has fed into how we've got to where we are today. I totally 100% agree with that, and I do think also, Tim, part of what's driving it as well is, I think there's a sense. a lot of people had that there was a lot of speculation about Biden's health, there was a lot of talking about Biden's health. There's been even a long sort of, sort of mea-culpa, sort of self-recrimination in some of the press that there wasn't enough talk about Biden's health. And I think some people are like, well, this guy is like super old and does clearly have some physical issues in front of him and also does seem to like blank out sometimes or like his brain seems mushy, although is it any musher than it was before, I don't know,

and a little bit of, like, frustration that it's not, like, even Stephen, I guess. Yeah. I think that there's probably some of that. It's also on people's mind, you know, right? I mean, like the gerontocracy side of this thing. Yes. You all said, I mentioned McConnell, you know,

froze a couple of times recently. You know, we've had this in several other cases. So I think that is something that leads to it. But I could not agree more with Jamel, just by the way, just both on this notion that, like, this does carry echoes of what you what you see in other countries. I forgot, I talked to one of my colleagues today

I was talking about how Castro was dying for 20 years. And that finally happened. It was too late. I do think there's a little bit of something to that for sure and that it reflects poorly on how the centrality of the presidency in our lives right now.