Dante
We Are The Third Man
Interesting email. Dante is no huge fan of Rick Wilson (rightwinger/true conservative), but he does follow some of the stuff put out by the Never Trumpers (who are not the Dems people here and elsewhere MAGA keeps attacking). You see, Dante does not live in an info-bubble. Rick is speaking about facts where old men and women are concerned.
Trump Is Dying - The Walter Reed Lie, for the 100th Time - Rick Wilson - May 26
<therickwilson@substack[.]com>
READ IN APP
This post is brought to you free by Incogni.
Let me say what the White House press corps cannot bring itself to say, what the Sunday shows have agreed to murmur around rather than at: Donald John Trump is dying.
He is dying in the ordinary biological sense, the sense in which you and I and every warm-blooded creature on this rolling rock flying through space and time are dying.
He is seventy-nine. He turns eighty next month. He went to Walter Reed today, his third visit in thirteen months (âTotally normal! Just a third checkup in a year!â), and the White House would like you to believe this is a wellness influencerâs self-care routine rather than what it obviously is: the late-stage management of a long-abused body breaking down in public.
Sure, itâs fun to speculate on what weâll all do when The Day arrives, but Trumpâs death isnât just physical.
But more importantly, more lastingly, he is dying as a force in our politics, as a presence in our culture, and as the dark gravitational center of the American right. The only people who canât see it are the ones whose paychecks depend on pretending the corpse is still doing pirouettes and burpees.
The manâs own physician diagnosed him last summer with chronic venous insufficiency, the swollen-ankles, blood-pools-in-the-legs condition you generally see in your great-aunt who needs the recliner kicked up before Wheel of Fortune. He has been photographed, repeatedly, with hand bruises the size and color of rotten plums, slathered in concealer that doesnât quite take. The official explanation is âfrequent handshaking and aspirin.â
Of course. Every septuagenarian I know who shakes hands has a hand that looks like he caught it in the door of a Buick.
Then thereâs the gait. The slowing shuffle to Marine One. The right-handed lean. The drifting into associative word-salad that, on Biden, would have launched a thousand Fox News chyrons in sixty seconds.
He has become, there is no way to say this without saying it, MAGAâŚdoddering. Unsteady. Tired. A man whose physical envelope is visibly insufficient for the job he claims to be doing.
Share
Evil ages you. Sin rests as heavy as lead on the bones. Cruelty and malice corrupt and destroy their bearers. You can see it in him now, the way you could see it in Mobutu, in Mugabe, in the gangsters of history who used the state as a punishment and piggy bank for too long.
Compare this with the saturation coverage of Bidenâs decline to the lullaby around Trumpâs.
When Biden trailed off, it was a three-day national emergency: cable hits, op-eds, anonymous-source pieces about West Wing concern. The 25th Amendment got more name-checks in 2024 than the Bill of Rights got in a decade.
A short break before we get to the rest of this storyâŚ
Your identity sells for less than a dollar
In the data broker market, and yes, it is a market, with brokers and buyers and quarterly earnings calls and almost certainly a trade association with a Christmas party, and a stupid fleece vests, your personal profile is a clearance-rack item. A few dollars, sometimes a few cents, and a perfect stranger walks away with the whole dossier on you.
Your address. Your phone number. Your relatives. Your property history. The make of your car. The church you go to on the Sundays you bother. What you bought on Amazon. How fast you drive. Your social security number. All of it, itemized, indexed, alphabetized, and ready to ship.
That data fuels the scams, the spam, the impersonations, the online harassment and stalking, and the increasingly creative flavors of identity fraud that have become as American as overdraft fees and a Big Gulp.
Incogni shuts the pipeline down. They go after hundreds of those broker databases and Dark Web sites on your behalf, force the removals, and then go back and do it again, because data brokers are cockroaches in a suit and tie, and they will absolutely crawl back the second you stop looking. Set it once. Let it run. Sleep better.
Stop your data from being sold. We were clients of Incogni for two years before Incogni became a sponsor for a reason: it just works.
Try Incogni today and get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.
Trump goes to Walter Reed for the third time in a year, with bruises hand-painted out of existence and a diagnosed circulatory disorder, and the coverage is what? A polite CBS write-around. A Washington Post nothingburger story detailing the drive up to Bethesda. A few brave souls noting that âindependent physicians say the White House hasnât answered key questions.â No Jake Tapper special. No glossy Original Sin book proposal. No âten Republican senators speaking on background.â Just the press doing what the press always does in the presence of an authoritarian project: flinching.
This is the most dishonest White House about the Presidentâs physical condition since Edith Wilson was forging her stricken husbandâs signature behind the curtains in 1919. The parallel is not casual. The memos, the âexcellent health,â the âsharpest president in American history,â the careful stagingâŚthe cover-up of Trumpâs diminished physical and mental capacity isnât coming.
The cover-up is already running. Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Chung, and the rest of the White House noise machine have lied to the media for years about Trumpâs condition, and never once been held to account.
Here is where the second death becomes impossible to ignore.
Trump is winning nothing. Trump is holding nothing. He is narrowcasting to a withering, contracting MAGA base dying off at a rate that will soon reshape the political landscape againâŚand mistaking the cheers in ever-dwindling crowds, in ever-smaller halls for the sound of a country still living in 2016.
Pew, last month: 34 percent. The lowest of his second term. Fox NewsâŚFox NewsâŚhas him down 24 points with Republicans since March 2025. Rural white voters, the base of the base of the base, have gone from +27 net approval to -6 in twelve months. Among his own 2024 voters, approval has slid from 95 percent to 78.
The MAGA coalition is not growing. It is not holding. It is shedding, paycheck by smaller paycheck, grocery receipt by grocery receipt, slowly creeping away from cultlike adoration with every trip to the gas pump.
The cable hosts and the Truth Social cheerleaders do not understand this, because they have marinated for a decade in a closed informational system: winning a MAGA primary is not winning the country. Filling a local VFW hall with red hats is not winning the country. The cheers inside the tent get louder as the tent gets smaller. Thatâs not strength. Thatâs the acoustic property of a shrinking room.
Upgrade to paid
Which brings us to the ballroom, the arch, the White House glitter bukkake redecoration, the urgent desire to slap his name on every flat surface. Add those out-of-touch moments to the pardons, the no-bid contracts, the crypto scams, the $1.7 billion slush fund, and the snake-pit of grift the second term has become.
The conventional read is that this is powerâŚthe dictator phase, the strongman unleashed.
I want to suggest the opposite. Strongmen at the height of their game donât need the ballroom. They donât need to rename the Kennedy Center after themselves. They donât need the gold leaf, the fake portraits, the rebranded monuments and memorials.
Thatâs the behavior of a man who knows the clock is running and is grabbing what he can while the grabbing is good. Thatâs Marcos in Manila in 1985. Thatâs Ceausescu in 1988, before he and the missus were lined up against a wall.
Genuine power doesnât need to be advertised this loudly. The frantic, escalating, almost pornographic self-celebration is the tell. Itâs a confession in plain sight. The man building his mausoleum while heâs still alive is the man who knows heâs running out of road.
So here we are. A 79-year-old man, swollen of extremity and bruised of hand, looking like the victim of a zombie bite by denying it until he turns, shuffling between Walter Reed and a half-built ballroom nobody asked for, with an approval rating in free fall, a base finally asking quiet questions about grocery prices, a press corps too cowed to say out loud what they all know, and a clock, biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot bully into stopping.
He is not coming back from this. There is no third act. There is only the long, undignified, makeup-smeared decline of a man and a movement whose moment has passed, narrating itself ever more loudly into an ever emptier hall, a frowzy barfly of a man, replaying past glories that never happened and hoping you wonât notice the bad wig.
Trump is dying.
Say it out loud. It will feel strange the first time. Less strange the second. By the tenth, youâll wonder why it took the rest of the press corps so long to catch up.
And yes, when The Day comes, I promise you that my better angels will be taking PTO.
...
Trump Is Dying - The Walter Reed Lie, for the 100th Time - Rick Wilson - May 26
<therickwilson@substack[.]com>
READ IN APP
This post is brought to you free by Incogni.
Let me say what the White House press corps cannot bring itself to say, what the Sunday shows have agreed to murmur around rather than at: Donald John Trump is dying.
He is dying in the ordinary biological sense, the sense in which you and I and every warm-blooded creature on this rolling rock flying through space and time are dying.
He is seventy-nine. He turns eighty next month. He went to Walter Reed today, his third visit in thirteen months (âTotally normal! Just a third checkup in a year!â), and the White House would like you to believe this is a wellness influencerâs self-care routine rather than what it obviously is: the late-stage management of a long-abused body breaking down in public.
Sure, itâs fun to speculate on what weâll all do when The Day arrives, but Trumpâs death isnât just physical.
But more importantly, more lastingly, he is dying as a force in our politics, as a presence in our culture, and as the dark gravitational center of the American right. The only people who canât see it are the ones whose paychecks depend on pretending the corpse is still doing pirouettes and burpees.
The manâs own physician diagnosed him last summer with chronic venous insufficiency, the swollen-ankles, blood-pools-in-the-legs condition you generally see in your great-aunt who needs the recliner kicked up before Wheel of Fortune. He has been photographed, repeatedly, with hand bruises the size and color of rotten plums, slathered in concealer that doesnât quite take. The official explanation is âfrequent handshaking and aspirin.â
Of course. Every septuagenarian I know who shakes hands has a hand that looks like he caught it in the door of a Buick.
Then thereâs the gait. The slowing shuffle to Marine One. The right-handed lean. The drifting into associative word-salad that, on Biden, would have launched a thousand Fox News chyrons in sixty seconds.
He has become, there is no way to say this without saying it, MAGAâŚdoddering. Unsteady. Tired. A man whose physical envelope is visibly insufficient for the job he claims to be doing.
Share
Evil ages you. Sin rests as heavy as lead on the bones. Cruelty and malice corrupt and destroy their bearers. You can see it in him now, the way you could see it in Mobutu, in Mugabe, in the gangsters of history who used the state as a punishment and piggy bank for too long.
Compare this with the saturation coverage of Bidenâs decline to the lullaby around Trumpâs.
When Biden trailed off, it was a three-day national emergency: cable hits, op-eds, anonymous-source pieces about West Wing concern. The 25th Amendment got more name-checks in 2024 than the Bill of Rights got in a decade.
A short break before we get to the rest of this storyâŚ
Your identity sells for less than a dollar
In the data broker market, and yes, it is a market, with brokers and buyers and quarterly earnings calls and almost certainly a trade association with a Christmas party, and a stupid fleece vests, your personal profile is a clearance-rack item. A few dollars, sometimes a few cents, and a perfect stranger walks away with the whole dossier on you.
Your address. Your phone number. Your relatives. Your property history. The make of your car. The church you go to on the Sundays you bother. What you bought on Amazon. How fast you drive. Your social security number. All of it, itemized, indexed, alphabetized, and ready to ship.
That data fuels the scams, the spam, the impersonations, the online harassment and stalking, and the increasingly creative flavors of identity fraud that have become as American as overdraft fees and a Big Gulp.
Incogni shuts the pipeline down. They go after hundreds of those broker databases and Dark Web sites on your behalf, force the removals, and then go back and do it again, because data brokers are cockroaches in a suit and tie, and they will absolutely crawl back the second you stop looking. Set it once. Let it run. Sleep better.
Stop your data from being sold. We were clients of Incogni for two years before Incogni became a sponsor for a reason: it just works.
Try Incogni today and get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.
Trump goes to Walter Reed for the third time in a year, with bruises hand-painted out of existence and a diagnosed circulatory disorder, and the coverage is what? A polite CBS write-around. A Washington Post nothingburger story detailing the drive up to Bethesda. A few brave souls noting that âindependent physicians say the White House hasnât answered key questions.â No Jake Tapper special. No glossy Original Sin book proposal. No âten Republican senators speaking on background.â Just the press doing what the press always does in the presence of an authoritarian project: flinching.
This is the most dishonest White House about the Presidentâs physical condition since Edith Wilson was forging her stricken husbandâs signature behind the curtains in 1919. The parallel is not casual. The memos, the âexcellent health,â the âsharpest president in American history,â the careful stagingâŚthe cover-up of Trumpâs diminished physical and mental capacity isnât coming.
The cover-up is already running. Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Chung, and the rest of the White House noise machine have lied to the media for years about Trumpâs condition, and never once been held to account.
Here is where the second death becomes impossible to ignore.
Trump is winning nothing. Trump is holding nothing. He is narrowcasting to a withering, contracting MAGA base dying off at a rate that will soon reshape the political landscape againâŚand mistaking the cheers in ever-dwindling crowds, in ever-smaller halls for the sound of a country still living in 2016.
Pew, last month: 34 percent. The lowest of his second term. Fox NewsâŚFox NewsâŚhas him down 24 points with Republicans since March 2025. Rural white voters, the base of the base of the base, have gone from +27 net approval to -6 in twelve months. Among his own 2024 voters, approval has slid from 95 percent to 78.
The MAGA coalition is not growing. It is not holding. It is shedding, paycheck by smaller paycheck, grocery receipt by grocery receipt, slowly creeping away from cultlike adoration with every trip to the gas pump.
The cable hosts and the Truth Social cheerleaders do not understand this, because they have marinated for a decade in a closed informational system: winning a MAGA primary is not winning the country. Filling a local VFW hall with red hats is not winning the country. The cheers inside the tent get louder as the tent gets smaller. Thatâs not strength. Thatâs the acoustic property of a shrinking room.
Upgrade to paid
Which brings us to the ballroom, the arch, the White House glitter bukkake redecoration, the urgent desire to slap his name on every flat surface. Add those out-of-touch moments to the pardons, the no-bid contracts, the crypto scams, the $1.7 billion slush fund, and the snake-pit of grift the second term has become.
The conventional read is that this is powerâŚthe dictator phase, the strongman unleashed.
I want to suggest the opposite. Strongmen at the height of their game donât need the ballroom. They donât need to rename the Kennedy Center after themselves. They donât need the gold leaf, the fake portraits, the rebranded monuments and memorials.
Thatâs the behavior of a man who knows the clock is running and is grabbing what he can while the grabbing is good. Thatâs Marcos in Manila in 1985. Thatâs Ceausescu in 1988, before he and the missus were lined up against a wall.
Genuine power doesnât need to be advertised this loudly. The frantic, escalating, almost pornographic self-celebration is the tell. Itâs a confession in plain sight. The man building his mausoleum while heâs still alive is the man who knows heâs running out of road.
So here we are. A 79-year-old man, swollen of extremity and bruised of hand, looking like the victim of a zombie bite by denying it until he turns, shuffling between Walter Reed and a half-built ballroom nobody asked for, with an approval rating in free fall, a base finally asking quiet questions about grocery prices, a press corps too cowed to say out loud what they all know, and a clock, biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot bully into stopping.
He is not coming back from this. There is no third act. There is only the long, undignified, makeup-smeared decline of a man and a movement whose moment has passed, narrating itself ever more loudly into an ever emptier hall, a frowzy barfly of a man, replaying past glories that never happened and hoping you wonât notice the bad wig.
Trump is dying.
Say it out loud. It will feel strange the first time. Less strange the second. By the tenth, youâll wonder why it took the rest of the press corps so long to catch up.
And yes, when The Day comes, I promise you that my better angels will be taking PTO.
...
