What’s in a Hand?

How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” It was Tuesday afternoon, and Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy was asking Donald Trump about the viral rumors that spread late last week, fueled by an uncharacteristic span of days without any public events, that the president was gravely ill.

“It’s fake news,” Trump replied, as he appeared, upright and very much not dead, for an announcement at the White House about the future of the US Space Command. “It’s just so—it’s so fake. That’s why the media has so little credibility.”

For several days, posts on sites like TikTok, X, and Reddit had picked up on Trump’s sparse calendar, as well as pictures of the president with bruising on his hands, as evidence that something had gone catastrophically wrong with his health. The White House has said the bruising was the result of frequent hand-shaking, but offered little to tamp down the growing online frenzy. “People were enjoying it,” said Claire Wardle, a Cornell University associate professor who studies misinformation. “It was the absence of information, and people filled in the gaps incorrectly.”

Despite how widely the rumors and memes spread, they were not exactly the indictment of the media that Trump and his political allies might want them to be. No mainstream outlets reported them as fact. “This was mostly a social media phenomenon,” said Kelly McBride, chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute. (After JD Vance encouraged his followers on X to “imagine what else [the media are] lying to you about,” Natalie Allison, a White House reporter for the Washington Post, responded, “A strong endorsement from the vice president to read newspapers and other established news media, which did not report the false claims that conspiracy theorists on social media peddled!”)