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Amanda Marcotte and #VanceDerangementSyndrome It's a natural follow-on from her #TrumpDerangementSyndrome

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s previous Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar, and the beer light behind her advertises Bud Light.

If someone were to ask me what the very lovely Amanda Marcotte hates the most, Republicans, Donald Trump, Christianity, Donald Trump, pro-life people, Donald Trump, conservatives, Donald Trump, pregnancies, J D Vance, or Donald Trump, while it wouldn’t be hard to say that she hates President Trump with a white-hot, #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-inflamed passion, she seems almost equally outraged by everything else.

I had just posted my previous article on Vice President J D Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, when the thought occurred to me, “I wonder what that hater of all things Christian thinks of his book.” Miss Marcotte had already published an article entitled Divorce him already, Usha, claiming that “JD Vance and his wife really seem to loathe each other,” while also laughably claiming that Salon, her publisher, is “a journalistic outfit,” a rather callous call to make the then three Vance children fatherless, only to wax wroth when Mrs Vance, along with Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, announced their pregnancies at about the same time.

So, naturally, I checked Salon, and was unsurprised by what I found: Continue reading →

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“Communion,” by J D Vance

I have my rosary hanging from the rear view mirror of my 2010 Ford F-150.

I will admit that it’s truly baffling to me that the northeast, the most politically liberal area of our country, is also our most heavily Catholic region, yet our good friends on the left love to spend their time bashing Catholics. It kind of makes me wonder just how actually Catholic they are.

Our 46th President was famously Catholic, attending Mass frequently, but he nevertheless supported but he prenatal infanticide, including wanting the federal government to pay for abortions including helping to pay for women in states which ban abortions to travel to states which do not, homosexuality, transgenderism, including overturning bans on transgender surgeries for minors, all things which the Church says are sins. Under his Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” due to the alleged:

probability that policy issues of mutual interest to RMVEs (Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists) and RTE (Radical-Traditionalist Catholics) adherents will remain in the public spotlight. Catalyzing events in which RMVEs and RTC adherents might have common cause include legislation or judicial decisions in areas such as abortion rights, immigration, affirmative action, and LBGTQ protections.

After this was exposed, FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth as to the extent of the program.

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported, undoubtedly to their discomfort, that “Catholicism is growing in Philly and New Jersey. Who’s filling the pews? Local diocese officials are confirming what’s becoming a global trend: more people are converting or coming back to Catholicism.”

That would undoubtedly appall the very lovely Jennifer Palmeiri, once Hillary Clinton’s director of communications, caught in this exchange when Mrs Clinton’s campaign e-mails were hacked and disclosed by Wikileaks:

Center For American Progress fellow John Halpin: Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) …they must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.

Miss Palmieri: I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.

That was then, and this is now, where we come to Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, by Vice President J D Vance.

Vance’s new book puts his Catholic faith at the center of his story — and his political future

by Steve Contorno | Monday, June 15, 2026

When JD Vance published his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, he had drifted away from the Christian faith of his childhood — a familiar story amid a broader national retreat from organized religion that had left church pews emptier than in previous decades.

Now, Vance as vice president — and likely 2028 presidential contender — is a practicing Catholic, a conversion he has chronicled in his second book, “Communion,” publishing Tuesday. And it’s landing on bookshelves amid a remarkable turnaround: Catholicism is, by some measures, experiencing a resurgence in the United States unlike anything in recent memory.

An American-born pope presides over the Vatican the first time in the church’s history. While Catholicism still faces long-term demographic struggles, conversions are surging, with some dioceses reporting record highs. Accounts of Gen Z converts filling church pews have injected new energy into the 2,000-year-old religion and have surprised even Catholic leaders who had long braced for continued decline.

I note, with some amusement, that the CNN article did not include a link to Mr Vance’s book. I am not particularly surprised.

St Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, where I attend Mass. Photo by D R Pico.

My small parish, St Elizabeth’s, is too small to be statistically significant, but we have seen that new energy as well. We have a couple and another man coming in as catechumens, and two new already Catholic families, along with another man, have moved in as well. For a small parish, in a small county, in an area of the country with few Catholics, it’s noticeable.

“Rather than doing the JFK thing and saying, ‘I’m not going to be a Catholic president,’ (Mr Biden said), ‘If I’m elected president, here is how my Catholic faith will inform my presidency,’” (Terry Schilling, the founder of American Principles Project) said.

President Biden’s Catholic faith didn’t inform his presidency very much it would seem. Rather, Mr Biden, like so many other elected Catholic Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, found that being a Democrat was far, far, far more important to them than being Catholic.

Polling shows that Catholics are moving in the direction of those who identify as evangelicals by becoming more conservative. Trump won 59% of Catholics in 2024, according to CNN exit polls, higher than any Republican presidential nominee since at least 1972. New converts and recently ordained priests and nuns also appear to be considerably more conservative than those born into the religion and older clergy, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at the Washington University Center on Religion and Politics.

You mean, Catholics are becoming more Catholic? That’s what we need to see!

We are seeing the weirdness of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate from the Lone Star State, and a Presbyterian Church USA seminarian, telling us that he is a devout Christian, but he supports prenatal infanticide, using the story of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) as a supposedly Christian argument for it, supports “trans children”, and The Advocate, a ‘magazine’ which supports homosexuality and transgenderism, has said the candidate “has positioned himself as a fierce queer ally, even using the Bible to advocate in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.” With that kind of idiocy oozing from a supposedly Protestant Christian church, we need more men like Vice President Vance to argue and testify for the truth.

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The truth has a conservative bias. That's why the left want to restrict your freedom of speech and of the press.

My good friend Jeffery[1]I do know his last name, but as he has tried to keep that private, I shall not publish it here, whether under that name, or his subsequently adopted screen names of Jethro Bodine or, currently, Elwood P Dowd, on William Teach’s fine site, The Pirate’s Cove, once made a claim, “The truth has a liberal bias,” sometimes expressed as “The facts have a liberal bias,” something I have seen elsewhere. It seems, however, that whatever they might say, our friends on the left are afraid, really afraid, of the truth, because the truth, the facts, actually have a conservative bias!

It was just over four years ago that we wrote about The New York Times publishing an article by a member of their own Editorial Board, Greg Bensinger, telling readers of that august supporter of Freedom of the Press that it was bad, bad, bad that Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, and that his promise to make the social media service an “inclusive arena for free speech” and that “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place.”

Mr Bensinger was by no means alone in that, as Brynn Tannehill of The New Republic told us that Mr Musk’s “idea of ‘free speech’ will help ruin America“, Taylor Lorenz, Amanda Marcotte, CNN’s Kara Alaimo, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Helen Ubiñas, as well as did the newspaper’s Editorial Board, and even 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry all exercised their freedom of speech and of the press to tell us that other people exercising those same rights without restrictions is harmful.

We pointed out that The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.” to claim that restrictions on speech actually promoted freedom of speech. They also published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, a not-very-good conservative alternative to Twitter following the banning of several conservative voices, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to other platforms.

And today? There were riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland, following the attempted beheading of a Scotsman by a Sudanese asylum seeker, and the Usual Suspects complained not about the attack, but about Twitter not censoring people writing about it! There’s more of that here and here and here.

The United Kingdom’s Secretary for Northern Island Hilary Benn said, following the knife attack in Belfast:

Social media companies have a very heavy responsibility. It’s why we’re going to bring forward new powers next week to make it clear that social media companies need to take down illegal content, particularly when we are facing circumstances such as the ones we’ve seen in Northern Ireland over the last two days.

It’s simple: our good friends on the left are afraid, deathly afraid, that if the people in general have the information Our Betters would rather not see disseminated, people might, horrors! draw conclusions from that information of which the left would disapprove!

That’s why The First Street Journal publishes the truth! That’s why we publish the photos and mugshots of criminals, regardless of race, because do not adhere to stupidity like the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and why we maintain our own Stylebook, which mandates actual truth in names, titles, and pronouns. The left want to obscure the truth, because yes, the truth has a conservative bias.

References

References
↑1 I do know his last name, but as he has tried to keep that private, I shall not publish it here
↑2 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.”
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Killadelphia: I confess to being unable to see how a victim’s race makes him either more or less dead.

On Sunday, November 28, 2021, Temple University student and a fellow with Philadelphia City Commissioner’s Office, Samuel Sean Collington, 21, was robbed and then murdered near the school in North Philadelphia. Mr Collington was a white victim, murdered by a black juvenile named Latif Williams in a botched robbery. On Thursday, December 2, 2021, The Philadelphia Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him.

On Thursday, September 22, 2022, recent Drexel graduate Everett Beauregard, 23, was senselessly murdered, shot in the neck.

Now there’s another senseless murder of 22-year-old William Schmidt, a Penn State student, in South Philly:

A Penn State student was shot to death in South Philadelphia, police said

The victim lived just steps away from where he was killed.

by Michelle Myers and Andrew Kitchenman | Sunday, June 7, 2026 | 1:59 PM EDT

A 22-year-old Penn State student died after being shot a half block from his home in South Philadelphia early Saturday, police said.

Police said officers from the 1st District responded at 1:32 a.m. to a radio call for a person with a gun on the 1900 block of Durfor Street. They found William J. Schmidt lying in the street with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.

Schmidt was returning home from a local bar where he had been watching the NBA Finals with friends, according to his father, 6abc reported.

Surveillance cameras captured video that appeared to show the moments before the shooting, 6abc reported. A man can be seen throwing a cell phone in one video, and seconds later, another man ran around a corner with Schmidt chasing him, before the gunman turned around and shot him, according to another video.

There’s more at the original.

Note that there was video, but the newspaper simply referred to the suspects as “a man”, “another man”, and “the gunman”. Now, on Wednesday, 6ABC released images of the suspects, and though they do not describe the suspects, we can see that the suspects are black males. Perhaps the newspaper, the day after Karmelo Anthony, a black male, was convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf, a white teenager, the Inquirer doesn’t want to fan any flames of racial hatred. Those who love to fan the flames of racial hatred have been decrying the fact that Mr Anthony was convicted at all, but at least as I am typing this, the Inky has neither any stories on the trial or the Usual Suspects among the columnists pontificating on the subject.

But that doesn’t mean the newspaper won’t have any stories about a black man being murdered by a white criminal!

Brooklyn man is convicted of fatally stabbing a Philly dancer at a gas station

Dmitriy Popov faces up to 25 years in prison for killing O’Shae Sibley at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023.

by Rob Tornoe | Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 4:38 PM EDT

A Brooklyn man has been convicted in the killing of beloved Philadelphia dancer O’Shae Sibley, who was stabbed to death at a New York City gas station in 2023.

Dmitriy Popov, 20, was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime and other charges related to “taunting, stabbing, and killing” Sibley, which included “hurling homophobic and anti-Black slurs,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.

Sibley, 28, was a gay Black man, while Popov, who was 17 at the time of the killing, is white. Popov, who was tried as an adult, faces up to 25 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 30.

The reporter, Rob Tornoe, went out of his way to tell us that there was a racial aspect to the killing. More, as the newspaper has been celebrating homosexual “Pride” month, Mr Tornoe had to tell us that the victim was homosexual. I’m not certain how Mr Sibley being black or homosexual makes him either more or less dead.

I do not celebrate the conviction of Karmelo Anthony, because he is a young man who had his whole life ahead of him. He got stupid, killed another young man with his whole life ahead of him, all due to a fight which should never have been a fight. Austin Metcalf is stone-cold graveyard dead, and Mr Anthony, when he gets out of prison in 17½ to 35 years will be a hardened criminal, with no future other than the next crimes he’ll commit. He’ll wind up back in prison, or dead.

The conviction was necessary, but no one is better off for it.

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Can socialists learn anything?

I raised, in our after-Mass Bible study group — contrary to some Protestant claims, Catholics actually do read the Bible! — a theological question: can God, who is omniscient, learn? My question was inspired by this: God, being all powerful, cannot be hurt, but by taking human form, Jesus suffered the agony of the crucifixion, so did God learn anything new in this?

Which leads me to a more mortal question: can socialists actually learn anything? Continue reading →

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The peasants are revolting!

Apparently, at least in liberal-speak, if you are a member of an Accredited Victim Group™, you do not have to do anything really radical like obey the law or behave like a civilized human being.

The City of Brotherly Love — a pretty appropriate nickname right now — has gone all out on the homosexual “Pride” month, something our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper has been very eagerly covering, and as you might have guessed, the party atmosphere has not led to orderly behavior.

15 arrested as police response to Gayborhood Pride festival spurs criticism from some in LGBTQ+ community

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said officers had responded “to a growing number of public safety concerns.”

by Jesse Bunch | Monday, June 8, 2026 | 7:06 PM EDT

Fifteen people were arrested at a Pride celebration in the Gayborhood on Sunday, authorities said, and the response drew criticism from some LGBTQ+ residents over how police handled crowd control at the event.

Images of police officers engaging with attendees in Center City circulated widely across local social media feeds on Monday, featuring criticisms of what some considered to be an outsized and aggressive law enforcement presence.

In one image shared on X, a police officer on a motorcycle appears to push against a woman’s chest, and in another photo, pushes the woman against a garage door while arresting her.

Others videos showed police on horseback dispersing young people from a sidewalk, as well as officers physically struggling with a man outside of the gay bar Woody’s.

Sounds like crowd control to me, efforts by the Philadelphia Police to keep things safe and orderly, among a crowd in which some partygoers might have consumed mood-or-judgement-altering substances.

And in yet another clip, a row of police officers — two of whom were wearing face coverings — formed a line to clear a barricaded Gayborhood street while officers on motorbikes rode along the sidewalks.

Joshua Stokem, a New Jersey resident who regularly attends the city’s Pride celebrations, said he has never seen that large of a police presence during such festivities.

“They were definitely getting more and more aggressive” as the gathering stretched into the early evening, said Stokem, who works as a promoter for LGBTQ+ events at city bars.

Councilmember Rue Landau, herself a member of the LGBTQ+ community, said in a statement Monday that LGBTQ+ constituents had reached out to her office in “outrage” and that she was working to better understand the department’s strategy.

It’s really simple: police officers in those situations are trying to keep things orderly and safe, while ‘revelers’ are not always inclined to behave.

Considering the size of the crowds, at least to judge by the coverage that The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philly television stations have provided, fifteen people being arrested, mostly for disorderly conduct, but at least one person “was arrested for aggravated assault of a police officer.”

Can I blame that on the newspaper’s encouraging attitude when it comes to citizens ‘resisting’ law enforcement when it comes to immigration? To me, those things are related. If someone has no respect for law enforcement in one area, would it be any particular surprise that such a person might have less respect for law enforcement in other areas?

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said in a statement that the celebration was “by all accounts, a successful event attended and enjoyed by thousands of people.”

Still, “as crowd sizes increased in the Gayborhood, officers responded to a growing number of public safety concerns, including fights, disorderly behavior, blocked roadways, and the challenges associated with safely managing large crowds in a confined area,” Bethel said.

What? Fights? Among our peaceful, leftist communities? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!

Let’s face it: Commissioner Bethel, all of the supervisors, and really every police officer in the City of Brotherly Love know that Philly is very supportive of the homosexual community, and they would certainly not be going out of their way just to beat up the revelers; that’s very much a career-limiting move, and with the city’s asinine, far-left, police-hating District Attorney, any cop would know that if he stepped over the line, Larry Krasner would want to throw him in jail. I’m not going to give any credit to the special pleaders for this particular Accredited Victim Group.™

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A huge scoop for The Washington Post! Another Pulitzer Prize is almost certainly headed their way

The Washington Post, one of our nation’s truly great newspapers, a national newspaper of record as far as the Federal Government is concerned, and the exposers of the Watergate coverup, has once again struck bigly with a major, major, yuge scoop:

The hair-loss drug Trump took for years is now absent from his medical records

White House officials say they are not obligated to disclose all of Trump’s medications, including whether he still uses finasteride.

Continue reading →

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Navy Joan Roberts is probably better off with her father being absent Perhaps the current generation of young adults are going to do things better

In the 1960s, I was the boy who was embarrassed about growing up without a father in small-town Mt Sterling, Kentucky. Divorce was far less common at the time, and all of the kids I knew in Mt Sterling Elementary School had fathers, or at least the ones about whom I knew anything about their families. I was the outlier!

My mother moved us to Mt Sterling because her sister had been able to get her a job. Our family, from Antioch, California, with a detour to Portland, Maine, my mother’s hometown, was completely unknown to the people there, and naturally no one had seen or heard of my father; there was no knowledge of him whatsoever, no knowledge that he had completely abandoned his wife and three children, so it could have been, at least for the townspeople, a question of whether it was somehow my mother’s fault. If you think that’s strange, it wouldn’t be to the mind of a nine-year-old boy with a girl’s first name, and the first one wearing glasses to boot. I at least think I can understand what life must be like for almost eight-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, growing up without her father, Hunter Biden.

Oh, there are certainly differences: my sisters and I grew up poor, because good jobs for women were rare in the sixties, and my father saw child support as more of an option than an obligation; men could get away with that far more at the time. My mother worked hard and struggled, in ways that it has taken the responsibilities of adulthood to make me understand now. Young Miss Roberts, and her mother Lunden Roberts, aren’t having to struggle too much financially, because her father has been hit with very substantial child support payments, but it’s also public knowledge that the younger Miss Roberts is a bastard, something that, as a child, I only feared people might think of me, and the fact that the older Miss Roberts was working as a stripper undoubtedly has many people thinking poorly of her. I guess that she was doing what she had to do to keep a roof over her head.

At a time when the Biden family ought to be slipping back into obscurity, former First Lady Jill Biden is back in the headlines as she has to do a tour to sell her book View from the East Wing: A Memoir. The problem for the tour is that Dr Biden has been denying that she saw in her husband what any wife should have noticed: that he was in serious mental decline, and her stories as she makes the rounds of talk shows have been shifting and never sounding truthful.

ABC’s ‘The View’ is a place for journolism, not journalism, but it is also a place in which the hostesses sometimes go off-script, and things like Dr Biden’s paean for her stepson get broadcast without critical thinking. Critical thinking is then applied from outside, as the former First Lady’s effusive praise of her wastrel stepson gets hammered from outside. President Biden finally acknowledged the young Miss Roberts as his granddaughter, though to my knowledge Dr Biden never did.

She’s certainly never been invited to family get-togethers, but the younger Mr Biden had married Melissa Cohen not long after his daughter was born, so such would be pretty awkward. Mr Biden knew that he had knocked up the elder Miss Roberts before he married someone else.

I have to confess here: I do not understand family relationships these days. My wife and I had been married, married for a few years, before our children were born, and after 47 years, we’re still married. I just don’t get men fathering children without the least regard for marrying the mothers or rearing their children. I suppose the things I saw so negatively when I was a child are commonplace now, and perhaps children growing up today without their fathers around just see it as normal, and hardly different from a bunch of the other children they know.

Our great, Christian society and culture has lost something. Now discussions are about “body counts,” how many people you’ve screwed, and, as much as it would horrify the lovely Amanda Marcotte, the fact that men trying to rack up high body counts for themselves are also ruling out women with high body counts as potential wives, even though women don’t get to rack up high body counts without men going right along with it.

But there is hope! Britain’s very leftist The Guardian reported that ‘millennials’ are not ‘hooking up’ for random sex as much as previous generations. A Google search for current generation having less sex turned up many more such articles, though several were hidden behind paywalls.

Along similar lines, we have reported on the slow growth of the Catholic Church, the faith that President Biden and his wife have professed, a faith which does not support contraception and abortion the way Miss Marcotte does, a faith which encourages personal responsibility and the confession of sins. Our good friends on the left hated people like Charlie Kirk for stressing such to college students, and the previously mentioned 48-year-old Miss Marcotte sees three married Republican women getting pregnant at about the same time through conspiracy theory eyes rather than more conservative women actually having more babies. She really, really, really doesn’t want the next generation of young adults to disapprove of her view about life and marriage and sex.

It will take more time to see how this all plays out, but perhaps, just perhaps, we are seeing a more conservative social and cultural movement among Americans.

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! After covering up stories on Joe Biden's health, the left are speculating about every bump and bruise on President Trump

The first rule of holes is that when you find yourself in one, stop digging. In the case of former First Lady, Dr Jill Biden, it works out to: when you keep saying stupid stuff, and can’t get out of your own way on it, just stop talking.

But, alas! when she’s on the hook to sell her book, View from the East Wing: A Memoir, she’s got to keep on keeping on, she’s got to keep making those appearances, got to keep talking, and got to keep deep throating her doubtlessly well-pedicured feet.

Why, I have to ask, would anyone pay the cover price of $32.00, $28.42 for Amazon Prime members, for a book of nothing but lies. At every stop she makes, with every word she says, we get the message: she’s just not telling the truth. But Simon & Schuster is paying her several million bucks, the exact amount undisclosed, so she has a contract to keep running her mouth.

The book hasn’t been well-received. CNN’s Jake Tapper, the well-connected Washington journalist who knew everybody who was anybody in Washington, wrote with Alex ThompsonOriginal Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, told us all how they were shocked, shocked! that Mr Biden’s aides helped to cover up the 46th President’s decline, now has an article showing on CNN’s subscribers’ only page entitled “Jill Biden’s rosy if not blindfolded ‘View from the East Wing’.” I guess that he’s trying to seem like a real journalist again, rather than the shill for the Democratic Party he was during the four-year interregnum between President Trump’s two terms. The Wall Street Journal‘s review by Kara Voght was just simping, and reading the review makes me wonder if she actually read the book itself, rather than some Cliff’s Notes version of it. Alexandra Jacobs review in The New York Times might have had the most damning with faint praise line of all, “The general vibe is more popovers in Woman’s Day than popping off in Politico.”

It’s almost as though the talking point had been sent out. Once everybody saw, on June 27, 2024, what we evil, reich-wing conservatives had been saying all along, that President Biden was becoming more and more out of it mentally, our good friends on the left decided that they had to attack President Trump’s health. The very lovely Amanda Marcotte has gone all-out conspiracy theorist on the subject:

Why MAGA buys Trump’s perfect health lie

Cultish devotion leads Republicans to see Trump as more god-like than human

by Amanda Marcotte | Monday, June 1, 2026 | 6:45 AM EDT

“When it happens” — the phrase became a meme almost overnight, as Troy Farah recently observed, in no small part because, even in our attention-addled age, people understand what it means. Donald Trump, who turns 80 this month, is not well, which has led to waves of speculation about his health and, at times, even rumors that he has died.

What great journalism in that first paragraph! Miss Marcotte gave us three citations via hyperlink, all of which lead back to Salon, the hard-left ezine for which she writes. The article is illustrated with a photo of the President’s left hand, with a visible bruise, and the caption, “Speculation continues to rise about the state of Donald Trump’s physical and mental health.” I’m not certain how a bruise on his hand leads to “speculation” about his “mental health.”

The president regularly nods off on camera during public meetings. He appeared to nap during the May 27 Cabinet meeting, even though his appointees were competing with each other to offer empty flattery, which is usually his favorite activity. His hands are not only covered in bruises, but they have also started to swell alarmingly. While he struggles to stay awake during the day, the president is often up at odd hours of the night, raving incoherently on Truth Social while obsessively reposting artificial intelligence-generated memes that frame him as heroic. He’s had at least two surprise trips to the “dentist” this year — even though the White House has its own fully equipped dental suite. On May 26, Trump had his third “annual” exam in 13 months at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, after which he posted, “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”

This is almost certainly a lie, though how big of one remains to be seen. People in perfect health don’t have swollen and bruised hands or the water balloon-sized ankles Trump sometimes sports. Even the White House communications staff has tacitly admitted that something is going on, though all they will say is Trump has chronic venous insufficiency, a conveniently benign condition. There is zero reason to trust Trump or his staff; they lie constantly about nearly everything. This includes false explanations about the president’s health, because the White House keeps insisting he’s merely blinking in photos with his eyes closed, when anyone who watches the videos can see his eyes are shut for long stints of time, and not just milliseconds.

While I certainly cannot speak for the President, I do sometimes close my eyes when I am concentrating, including concentrating on what I am hearing, something not uncommon among those of us who are partially deaf.

But Miss Marcotte is ramping up for the conclusion she wants readers to draw: that the physical ailments of a man who will turn 80 twelve days from now indicate a mental ailment as well. After all, Mr Biden was losing his marbles when he was in his 80s, so why shouldn’t the same be true of President Trump?

Dr. Jonathan Reiner of The George Washington University, who was former vice president Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, told CNN that Trump is showing symptoms of chronic insomnia, which “is a severe illness that can result in an increase in risk of dementia” and a “decrease in cognitive effects” that “increases your cardiac risk of having a heart attack or developing congestive heart failure.” It appears that the president has undergone multiple cognitive tests, because Trump, who seems to confuse them with IQ tests, keeps bragging about how he was told him he had “aced” them. Such exams are typically given when doctors suspect cognitive decline, as journalist Jim Acosta underscored recently by taking the test himself, which involves drawing a cube or identifying common animals.

As a part of my annual Medicare examination — I’m 73 years old — I got the simple cognitive test, mine being to draw a circle and then add the hours of a clock on the face. Being the snarky guy that I am, I made it a 24-hour clock face, just to amuse the nurse, and I’m wondering how today’s generation, familiar almost entirely with digital clocks, will do. 🙂

But it’s amusing: the left want to do something, do anything to get rid of President Trump. The only evidence they have of cognitive problems for the President is that they are outraged by the decisions he takes. Yet if President Trump does fail to complete his term, for whatever reason, Vice President J D Vance then becomes President — something I currently hope he does on January 20, 2029 — and they’ll hate Mr Vance, who is only 41 years old, just as much as they do Mr Trump.

Godwin’s law, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” amuses here. The younger President Bush was “literally Hitler,” which was conveniently ignored when President Trump also became Hitler during his first term, and during the four years in the wilderness, before his triumphal return to Washington. If Mr Vance becomes President, will we see yet another reductio ad Hitlerum applied to him.

Miss Marcotte has already expressed her wish for the Vances to divorce.

There actually is a mental problem rampant among our friends on the left, called Trump Derangement Syndrome. There were a lot of things conservatives disliked about President Biden and his four years in office, but if there were any stories about wild-eyed conservatives saying things about the President on social media that got them fired, I missed them. Chaya Raichik and her Libs of TikTok became hugely successful for quoting what the left were saying about themselves, and even today (supposedly) educated professionals have lost jobs and professional accreditations for posting really stupid stuff about wanting to kill the President and members of the Administration. Conservatives haven’t proven themselves to be that deranged!

That mental problem was never on greater display than the four years of the Biden Administration. Our friends on the left kept assuring us that everything was just fine with Mr Biden, he was sharp as a tack, always on top of his game, pretty much exactly what his loving wife was saying about him. Contrast that with today, and every little bruise on the President’s hand leads the media to speculate that he’s at death’s door, with exactly zero evidence of such.

About his health? The fact is that we do not really know, but we do know that he’s twelve days shy of his 80th birthday, he’s visibly overweight, and despite his many years of wealth, he prefers to eat pure junk. It’s been long reported that he wants his steaks well done, and with ketchup, which is, to my mind, his only impeachable offense. If the man did suddenly die, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. What I’m not going to do, however, is speculate blindly and aimlessly, and I’m not going to stop telling the truth.