'He has created this beast': Trump falls victim to conspiracy theory culture he helped create

Back in March 1953, U.S. media outlets delivered some "breaking news": Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin had died in Moscow at the age of 74. But that "breaking news" was really old news, as Stalin had died days earlier — and Communist Party officials in the Kremlin had kept his death from going public.

Many years later, over Labor Day Weekend 2025, conspiracy theorists claimed that something similar was happening in the United States: U.S. President Donald Trump, they claimed, had died — only Trump Administration officials were keeping his death from going public. New photos of Trump that were published online over Labor Day Weekend exposed that conspiracy theory as total nonsense, showing that Trump was very much alive.

In an article published on September 6, The Guardian's Hugo Lowell emphasizes that the "Trump has died" conspiracy theory speaks volumes about the political environment in the United States in 2025.

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"The rumors played out against a backdrop in which Trump has spent years lying and hiding his medical records while displaying a penchant for McDonald's and other fast food, though he says he neither drinks nor smokes," Lowell explains. "Recently, he has been seen with bruising on the back of his right hand, sometimes poorly concealed with makeup, and swelling around his ankles."

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, warns that even people who seem reasonable can buy into outlandish conspiracy theories.

Jacobs told The Guardian, "This insatiable hunger for Donald Trump to be gone convinced otherwise intelligent people who pride themselves on scrutiny that here was the hope that he was dead and gone. It is a window into the danger of misinformation and the way in which that's accelerated through the online memes and videos. It was quick and fairly effective in convincing thousands, maybe millions of people that Donald Trump was actually gone, even though there was no evidence of that other than he hadn't been seen for a day or two."

When Stalin died in 1953, American television didn't have 24-hour news stations. There were nationalist newscasts from NBC and CBS as well as local newscasts, but there was no CNN, MSNBC, CNBC or C-SPAN. The internet was many years away.

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Reed Galen, a Never Trump conservative and president of the group The Union, argues that the "Trump is dead" conspiracy theory reflects today's 24-hour news cycle.

Galen told The Guardian, "The guy is so omnipresent that when he's gone for 36 or 48 hours, he leaves such a hole in the news. For those who make a political living on bashing Donald Trump, you need the daily tweets, you need the daily outrage, you need the insanity of a Cabinet meeting or a pool spray in the Oval Office. When you don't have it, you're like, wait! It's like you're addicted, like you gotta eat ice cream every day — and one day, you don't get your ice cream, and wait a second, something's missing. What's happening?"

Galen added, "The medium is the message. He has created this beast that even he must feed — and when he doesn't, people are like: Wait a second, what's going on? Because it's so out of character."

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Read Hugo Lowell's full article for The Guardian at this link.