With all that’s going on in the news, you could be forgiven for missing the scuttled interview that President Ashleigh Grantham gave to NPR’s Myrtle Campos-Cockle this morning. In an exclusive, NPR says it has confirmed that Grantham toured the RevTech outfit at the Treetops Trailer Community in the last few weeks.

The first part of their conversation is about what you’d expect — Grantham reiterates his intent to increase U.S. funding for Israeli attacks on Gaza and makes the case that he’s the rightful president under the 25th Amendment.

But the real fireworks come at the end of the interview. Grantham becomes unsettled when Campos-Cockle confronts him with evidence that he’s met with Carron Nielsberg and Pastor Kathy Donaldson at Treetops on at least one recent occasion. It’s unclear when the meeting took place, but it’s at least been since RevTech set up shop in Turner Falls; I heard from my own sources who spotted a presidential detail at Treetops in mid-October, but that’s not unusual these days, what with Rudy Ruiz making frequent visits to the trailer community. I’m kicking myself for not following up.

As the political and legal contest for the presidency between Rudy Ruiz and Ashleigh Grantham Jr. heats up (or drags on, depending on how you look at it), I thought it might be an interesting distraction to try to answer a question that has been indirectly posed by the so-called “Battle for the White House.”

To wit: What is the nature of Rudy Ruiz’s spiritual and physical condition?

It was only a matter of time before a notable post-Ruiz-exhumation death really razzed up the Very Online contingents.

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell’s second public ~ episode ~ a few weeks ago inspired a number of snarky #PagingCarronNielsberg posts, but the death of 90-year-old California Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday night kicked the inevitable into high gear. Not to devalue the rich trove of #RiseofDumbledore content following Michael Gambon’s demise on the same day, but … the invocation of RevTech following Feinstein’s passing was scary fast in both tone and execution.

After an unpredictable storm system delayed the Ruiz Commission’s court-approved exhumation of the presidential gravesite at Beaulieu Hills Cemetery in Turner Falls last week, America finally has an answer to the question that has riveted the nation since the first GOP presidential debate back in August: who, if anyone, is buried in the grave marked for President Rudy Ruiz?

By now, of course, y’all know the answer — unless you’ve been living under a rock buried even deeper than Rudy Ruiz’s capacious casket. (If so, I’m more than a little jealous.)

Popping in for a short, quick post today with some breaking news: We finally have a ruling in the federal case concerning the exhumation of Rudy Ruiz’s remains (or, he claims, the lack thereof). Late this afternoon, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that congressional investigators for the Ruiz Commission will indeed be allowed to take a look inside Ruiz’s grave to determine whether the man who claims to be the deceased former POTUS is a fraudster or, in fact, actually a resurrected, (and possibly current) POTUS.

President Ashleigh Grantham’s Department of Justice issued a press release shortly following the ruling’s release, saying it wouldn’t continue to challenge the matter, “as we have no interest in further prolonging the search for the answers that Americans deserve.” The Grantham Administration went on to say that the president is “confident” the Ruiz Commission will find “the sadly deceased president exactly where he is expected to be: in eternal repose.”

While a federal judge considers President Ashleigh Grantham Jr.’s petition to keep the congressional commission investigating President Rudy Ruiz’s death (and supposed resurrection) from exhuming the contents of Ruiz’s grave here in Gallum County, the country seems to be going various levels of insane. (Content warning here for reports of self-harm.)

Last night, formerly deceased President Rudy Ruiz took the stage at the national GOP debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, claiming to be the first person billionaire-backed biotech company RevTech has ever successfully treated with what has been described as a “miraculous” advancement in medicine. According to Ruiz, RevTech, and a cadre of supporters, the company is capable of reversing “mortal events” — in plain speech, bringing people back from the dead.

But one Turner Falls resident takes exception to an important part of that characterization.

“I don’t want to take anything away from Rudy — I mean, the president, Mr. President,” said Mitch Carter, who was injured in the Independence Day storms that saw tornados touch down at the Treetops Trailer Community and in downtown Turner Falls, TX. “But he got a lot of firsts under his belly already. I was first on this thing.”

I knew who it was going to be the second — the second — the words “surprise guest” came out of debate moderator Bret Baier’s mouth.

Sharp-eyed commentators noticed something was up as soon as viewers got the first wide shot of the stage, set with nine lecterns rather than the expected eight. Slate politics writer Hari Blake even fired off this crack on Twitter:

Minutes later, of course, after President Grantham, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and the rest of the crew took the stage, Baier introduced the ninth debater, “special guest” President Rudy Ruiz. The same President Rudy Ruiz who was killed in a plane crash on Independence Day; the same President Rudy Ruiz who was mourned by tens of thousands who descended on his hometown of Turner Falls for his funeral.

This morning, when I took a swivel-seat across the plastic table from Linda Lyle’s easy smile — which is anything but plastic, itself — at the McDonald’s on the outer loop highway outside Tyler, she reached for my hand and gave it a familiar, grandmotherly squeeze. Her warm welcome belied the dark impetus for our meeting: The worried, rambling voicemail she left me about Carron Nielsberg “screwing with” her neighbors at the Treetops Trailer Community. “They’re running some kind of tests on our people out here,” she said in her message. “And it don’t look legitimate to me.”

Fine, I said — happy to have her only daughter back home, especially since it means she’s got someone to share a pot of real coffee with after my stepdad switched to decaf last year.

But first: the small-town pleasantries.

I arrived early enough at the New Life Church of Turner Falls on Sunday to get a priority-section seat for what I was assured would be the beginning of a historic, world-changing, paradigm-shifting revolution in our very understanding of what it means to be human.

I half expected to be recognized, even among the thousands who queue up well in advance for the church’s flagship weekly broadcast, and booted out in retaliation for last week’s newsletter. Instead, I was treated to nearly an hour of pre-show programming, most of it concerned with ensuring parishioners are tithing to the fullest extent of their financial ability. (Semantic quibble: doesn’t “tithing” mean giving 10 percent of whatever you’ve got? Either you’re tithing or you’re not!)

For new subscribers — allow me to extend a grateful welcome to Trash Tabs readers and an ungrateful unwelcome to the PatriotWire trolls who have been flooding my inbox with threats and hate speech — here’s where we’re at: a billionaire lightly kidnapped me last month in an attempt to convince me he had resurrected the President of the United States from the dead, the details of which would be revealed to the world last weekend during the Sunday, July 30th 11 a.m. service at New Life.

And while that’s definitely one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever written, it is not the strangest, because the strangest is the one I’m about to write:

Three days ago, I was introduced to a man claiming to be U.S. President Rudolfo “Rudy” Ruiz, who was killed in a plane crash on July 4th. In exchange for this exclusive scoop — what my source called “the biggest story in human history” — I was provided with what my source asserted was documentation confirming the “President’s” identity, and was asked to keep our meeting under wraps until 11 a.m. this Sunday, July 30th.

I have obviously decided to run with this story — or more likely, this stunt — well before the weekend. This is a career first for me. I have never burned a source, deliberately broken an embargo, or reneged on an even tentative agreement with a source, but I can’t see a way around it here that also maintains my professional integrity. I have protected plenty of sources whose politics I found repulsive, and withheld information about acts I found shocking or even knew to be criminal in the service of uncovering greater truths. But I refuse to be used as an outright pawn or patsy.

Public interest in presidential autopsies has seen a resurgence thanks to the multitude of conspiracy theories surrounding the death of President Donald Trump from COVID complications in 2020. Prior to that, you might have very occasionally encountered the odd Kennedy-obsessive opining on the lesser-populated corners of the internet about bullet trajectories and second gunmen. But the QAnon/LibertyNow!/anti-vaccine movements turned thousands into wannabe-pathologists, so much so that there’s reportedly an unofficial squad of federal employees whose job it is to identify and scrape doctored reports from online forums and the like.

All to say: no one needed a crystal ball to predict that it would be a real scrum when the Ruiz presidential autopsy was released, but I don’t think anyone expected the White House and the Congressional Commission on the Events of July 4, 2023 — colloquially, the “Ruiz Commission” — to distribute the preliminary findings from the “black box” flight data recorder and the Ruiz autopsy on the same day.

It’s been a little over a week since the crash of a private plane, which according to the White House was transporting President Rudolfo “Rudy” Ruiz from Turner Falls to a “private fundraiser” at Cibolo Creek Ranch1 in West Texas, resulted in the death of the most-loved and most-hated president of the modern era. The New York Times has reported that the plane was registered to the pastor of Turner Falls’ New Life Church, Kathy Donaldson, a longtime ally and mentor to President Ruiz.

For now, the Rudy Ralliers who descended upon Turner Falls for the president’s memorial events have mostly emptied out from area parks and campgrounds, and things are sort of starting to return to something like normal around here.

Although what value the word “normal” has these days is probably up for debate. Officials in Washington, D.C. have instituted a 9 p.m. curfew following what is now going on nine days of protests and demonstrations in and around the Capitol complex, leading to dozens of arrests — mostly of left-leaning #FreezeRuiz activists, who have clashed with the right-wing “Pink Bandana Brigade” and “Rud Boys,” student offshoots of the LibertyNow! movement.

So, this is how my Friday morning started:

My stepdad woke me up around 1 a.m. — not on purpose, but you know that thing where people who are trying to be quiet are actually louder than they would be if they weren’t trying to be quiet? Well, Daddy Deke is a bull in a china shop on his best day. One of his fishing buddies tipped him off that folks from out of town were already starting to line up at the Daingerfield State Park gates, so it was either lay in bed and listen to him cuss and moan getting the camper out of the back garage or help him while he cussed and moaned getting the camper out of the back garage.

He hasn’t missed a Rudy Rally in years — a fact he shares with anyone who will listen, and many who have already heard it a thousand times, yours truly included — and wasn’t going to miss what would presumably be the last one. I rode with him over to the park (the aforementioned fishing buddy was not kidding about the late-night line) and then hitched a ride to town to get in another line, this time outside New Life Church, where President Ruiz’s funeral was scheduled for mid-afternoon Friday.

When I left the Turner Corner Shoppe & Stoppe after the storm last night, I expected the post I’d be writing this morning would be about Turner Falls recovering from the worst severe weather event to hit Northeast Texas in a century. I expected it would be a story about a small town — the president’s hometown — coming together after a tragedy during a time of unprecedented national discord. Because the scene last night? Was pretty freaking apocalyptic.

I did not expect to be writing about the death of the president of the United States.

I definitely did not expect to be one of the last people to see him alive.