It Appears Trump is Alive
And my sources misled me
It would appear that sources that had thoroughly convinced me that Mr. Trump had passed were misleading me.
UPDATE: My sources weren’t lying. They honestly thought he was dead. He had been hidden away apparently due to serious health problems.
It's good that you're honest about this. The difference between an honest reporter and a conspiracy theorists is that the conspiracy theorist never admits when they're wrong.
Let's now realize that "Trump is dead" fantasies are a distraction from the real work of dismantling MAGA.
Mike, I am dropping this comment on this piece because of its recency, which I hope provides a better chance for you to see it, but it’s about your previous piece on your mental health. Which was, I am sorry to say, a word salad of breathtaking dissembling, and, well, just plain horse manure. As a retired business and tech journalist, I have followed you since your seminal work after the election about how Trump and the tech elite formed one of the most dangerous mutual assistance pacts in modern history. Your Sovereign Individual piece was a tour de force of connecting the dots that no one else is doing to any meaningful degree. Especially In those cases, I know enough to know how right you’ve been, and you have the credibility to lay it all out because you’ve been there, and you undoubtedly talk to others who still are.
And then the Trump death notice, an area in which you have no credentials, and which would be the biggest story of the century. You spent much of your mental health piece trying to explain your process, and a bunch of other mumbo jumbo about the distinctions your readers need to understand. And then this:
“The disagreement between me and those readers is not a disagreement about my mental state. It is a disagreement about whether a writer is ever entitled to publish a claim whose foundation he cannot fully disclose, and how to weigh his certainty against the reader’s right to inspect the floor under it. That is a real disagreement and we will resolve it on Friday, or whenever the underlying question resolves, not by my reassuring you about my sleep schedule.”
No sir. This is a disagreement about whether a responsible writer drops a bomb like you did without spending a helluva lot of time checking to determine if it’s true. It’s a disagreement about whether a writer should ask himself whether such a massive conspiracy could possibly be maintained in today’s political and media environment. It’s not a disagreement about you revealing a source, but whether you must demonstrate that there is a preponderance of evidence to corroborate the story.
What your paragraph does is come perilously close to the “there-no-such-thing-as-truth” argument. And the result is that I now begin to question everything else that you write.
I sincerely hope, Mike, that you will do the right thing in your next piece. Eat your three full meals of crow, and get on with the business of educating us the way you have been. That’s what will make a difference, and what we so badly need.