Many Such Takes: Rage Video Du Jour, Trump's Health, Gaylors and More

Plus: an all-new Trump impression

Aug 31, 2025

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to.

The Argument

The rest of MST will be used to highlight funny discourse and drama, but I wanted to take a moment to highlight the amazing work of my friend

Lakshya Jain

, who has co-founded The Argument. Instead of trying to explain what this is and butchering it, I’ll let Lakshya speak for it. TLDR: you should subscribe!

I'm so excited to be a part of The Argument! We're a home for liberalism, but we don't shy away from our principles or from debating and defending them across the ideological spectrum. The depressing thing, to me, is that the last ten years of political coverage has become breathless gossip fodder, centered around "who's winning" rather than why people vote and think in the way that they do. Here, we'll try shining a light on the why, rather than just the what, with a focus on rigorous data and polling work to substantiate our arguments and understand the ways in which people process information and think about complex issues, whether on social identity and interactions, housing, AI, healthcare, speech, economics and tariffs, or any number of other pressing issues in the world.

Rage Video Du Jour

Every now and then, someone posts a pretty innocuous video of a young attractive woman (usually in NYC) who makes a banal video about everything she ate, drank and bought over the course of the day. Typically, these women are influencers, although it’s not always obvious to everyone watching the content, because people invariably get mad about her constant consumption and vapidity. Anyway, this week was no exception.

Is this guy okay?

Clearly, the issue is that she’s just too damn hot with bazungas that are too bodacious. If you’re more into small-chested moms talking about their vapid consumption, check out my monthly fashion roundup.

Trump’s Health

Ever since the night Trump announced his diagnosis with covid on Twitter, nothing has felt the same. It’s hard to explain just how iconic “Trump got covid” was. Anyway, people are constantly trying to create new “Trump got covid” moments, and this week was no exception. Some folks on Twitter found the White House schedule, noted a lack of appointments for Trump, and noted that Trump hadn’t been spotted in public in a while. This could only mean one thing: Trump is dead.

This didn’t come entirely out of nowhere. Lately Trump has been seen with weird-looking infusion bruises on his hands, which caused some people to cast doubt on his health. In a recent interview, JD Vance was asked about Trump’s health, which led to a particularly inconvenient quote:

Uh oh:

And now, Trump himself on the controversy:

1×

0:00

-3:17

Secular Wimple

At some point this week, I started seeing a lot of this account which referred to white people as “cracker settlers” (among some other content in this general milieu) but also appeared to be white. Upon closer inspection, this person was also wearing some kind of Wiccan amulet and what appeared to be a….forest green crushed velvet hijab? Knowing that they couldn’t possibly be Muslim and Pagan simultaneously, I wondered what the hell was going on. As it turns out, other people were wondering too. They clarified that the hijab was actually a “hijab-inspired secular accessorization.”

Things got more amusing, however, when they referred to it as a “secular wimple.”

Given the otherwise inflammatory nature of their posts, I assumed this was a masterful attempt at 2010s-era Tumblr trolling, but some posts indicate they may be real. Either way, they managed to ascend to Main Character status quite literally all week. And who am I to judge? After all, let him who is without a secular wimple among you cast the first stone.”

But hey, at least it wasn’t a lesbian-appropriating caribiner:

Gaylors

As I covered earlier this week, Taylor Swift got engaged to her boyfriend of two years, Travis Kelce. At the time, I focused on a particularly aggrieved Substack writer who felt that Taylor Swift was betraying the smart feminists of the world by succumbing to the patriarchal institution of marriage, and I merely glossed over another group of people who have been convinced for years that Taylor Swift is actually a lesbian: The Gaylors.

The Gaylors are obviously not happy about Taylor Swift getting engaged (my weird take on this is that if she was pretending to be straight, this would also be within the realm of things she might do, but I can see why it’s startling.)

The best Gaylor bit, however, probably came from notorious Internet troll/comedian ratlimit. Ratlimit has gone viral in the past for fooling Twitter into believing absurd premises, so this was not surprising for anyone who was aware of Ratlimit. However, many people weren’t, so people believed it. First, she pretended to be on the verge of jumping into a subway track until Taylor Swift admitted to being a lesbian.

She then “tagged” Taylor Swift to confirm in a way that made it look like Taylor Swift had untagged herself, by using alternative characters so the tag wouldn’t link. Regrettably, I admit I fell for this.