President Donald Trump’s Labor Day weekend was quiet, but his schedule was not ‘suspended’
Labor Day weekend might have been quiet at the White House, but one viral video worked overtime to add fuel to unsubstantiated social media rumors about President Donald Trump’s health.
“In the past few hours speculation has spread suggesting that something extremely serious may have happened to President Donald Trump,” a narrator with a news-reporter cadence announced in a video posted to X on Sept. 1. “It all began when the president’s official schedule was suddenly suspended without any convincing explanation, sparking doubts about his true state of health.” The video had been viewed more than 1.4 million times as of late afternoon Sept. 2
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.