The Panic of Permanence

As Trump ages in public, he races to carve his name into the state

For too long, the press treated Donald Trump like a supernatural force rather than a mortal man: impervious to fatigue, immune to consequence, forever yelling at full volume as if rage itself were a renewable energy source. Now, suddenly, the spell is breaking. Not all at once, not so much with a single headline declaring something is wrong, but with a dawning, uneasy realization spreading across newsrooms that the President of the United States looks, sounds, and behaves like a 79-year-old man who is not particularly well, and that pretending otherwise is starting to feel downright dishonest.

A Guardian piece by Moira Donegan is where the curtain first parts. It doesn’t diagnose; it inventories. The sallow tan, the nodding off, the vanishing schedule, the swollen ankles, the mysterious bandaged hand, the MRI nobody can quite explain. It’s a catalog of patterns that institutional journalists have quietly avoided naming for years. Donegan does something deceptively radical: she asks, plainly, “Is Donald Trump OK?” The question lands with weight precisely because it has been treated as unaskable. Even more destabilizing, she ties Trump’s visible physical decline to his political one. As his approval collapses and elite fear dissipates, the myth of invulnerability evaporates. Mortality, once politely ignored, strolls into the press room and takes a seat.

USA Today, of all places, then kicks the door off its hinges. There is no throat-clearing, no faux neutrality, no “critics say.” The headline calls Trump’s prime-time address “crazed” and dares to compare it to Joe Biden’s infamous debate performance, the moment that permanently rewired how the media talks about presidential capacity.