I was scrolling through my social media feed a couple of nights ago, as one does, when I noticed the hashtag. First, it was #WhereIsTrump. I paused. Huh. That’s odd. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it was true, he hadn’t been in the public eye for a few days, which for him is like a geological era.
I chuckled and kept scrolling, but the internet hive mind was just getting started. Within hours, the speculation had gone from curious to conspiratorial. The initial hashtag soon morphed into the much more morbid, and frankly, completely unhinged, #TrumpIsDead.
You couldn’t look away. It was a masterclass in how a vacuum of information gets filled by the most outlandish theories imaginable. People were posting grainy photos, analyzing flight logs, and spinning tales of secret health crises. Was he sick? Was he in hiding? Had he finally been replaced by a body double? The internet had written the first draft of a political thriller in real time.
And then, just as the rumors reached a fever pitch, the bubble burst.
The big reveal wasn’t some shocking exposé or a somber press conference. Instead, a video surfaced. There he was, clad in his usual golf attire, out on a sun-drenched green. He wasn’t orchestrating a secret plot or recovering from a near-fatal illness. He was playing golf. With his grandchildren.
And that’s what makes this whole episode so funny.
The whiplash between the internet’s dark imagination and the mundane reality is pure comedic gold. We had collectively created this massive, dramatic mystery, and the answer was the most predictable, most on-brand thing possible. The man likes to golf. Of course that’s where he was. Not! One fake or old picture after another gets trotted out and we are all supposed to believe it?
It’s a perfect snapshot of our absurd modern media cycle. A few days of silence from a figure who has dominated the news for nearly a decade is enough to send the world into a frenzy, only for the answer to be disarmingly simple.
So, where was Trump?
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