Trump's "Sleeping" During Official Events May Be Cardiogenic Syncope Involving Cerebral Hypoperfusion

Recently there have been quite a few different days in which the press reported US president Donald Trump "falling asleep" during televised events in the White House. In the typical event that has occurred, Trump will be seen sitting at a desk, and behind him will be various people talking. As someone else talks, Trump will close his eyes for quite a few consecutive seconds.  Incidents of this type have reportedly occurred quite a few times.  The March 24 article here claims that there have been 13 such events. There have been multiple reports of Trump falling asleep at official events in the weeks since March 24.The latest report has a headline of "Trump, 79, Falls Asleep Seconds After Speaking in White House Event."

The press seems to have been uniform in its coverage of these events, describing them as cases of Trump "napping" or "falling asleep." But let me suggest a novel hypothesis about the cause of these events, one I have not read anyone else suggest. These events may be something more serious. Rather than mere napping, these events may be short events of fainting, caused by a drop in blood pressure. Syncope is the medical term for fainting. There is a type of problem called cardiogenic syncope, and the older a person is, the more likely it is to occur. When cardiogenic syncope occurs, blood pressure may undergo a sharp temporary drop because of some malfunction in the heart, often a heart arrythmia or a temporary deviation from the heart's normal sinus rhythm, or some heart pumping problem. The drop in blood flowing to the brain results in a state called cerebral hypoperfusion, which results in fainting or loss of consciousness. 

The infographic visual below (modified from one generated by Google Gemini) explains how cardiogenic syncope involves a short-lasting dip in the flow of blood to the brain. 

If a person is standing and has an episode of cardiogenic syncope, the result may be a very noticeable collapse. But a person sitting and having such an episode may merely appear to be napping for a short time. I asked Google this: "Can cardiogenic syncope look like napping?" I get this answer from an AI overview: "Yes, cardiogenic syncope (fainting caused by a heart condition) can sometimes look like someone is 'napping,' dazed, or in a deep sleep, particularly if the episode is very brief or occurs while they are already sitting or lying down."

By itself a tendency towards cardiogenic syncope does not have any very grave short-term prognosis. Typically the fainting episodes are brief, and do not cause any permanent brain damage. An old person with such a tendency may well continue to live for years, and may function well. But his chance of sudden cardiac death or heart failure death during those years will tend to be much higher. Whether such a person can continue to do a job well depends on the frequency of the episodes, and what type of job the person does. 

If a very old president were to be having occasional episodes of cardiogenic syncope (fainting uncontrollably now and then), he might well be able to get by without people noticing, particularly if he was careful to avoid events involving prolonged standing, and instead mainly did Oval Office events while seated. Such a president might be  able to do his job well on most days. The problem would be that the cardiogenic syncope would tend to create rare days in which the president was pretty much incapacitated, and incapable of doing his job well.

In Caucasian people cardiogenic syncope involving cerebral hypoperfusion tends to temporarily create a rather white-looking face, a pale face color.  The word for that is pallor. If you do a Google image search for photos of Trump sleeping in the Oval Office, you will not typically see a pale-looking face. But that does not discredit the possibility discussed here, simply because it is widely believed that Trump applies colored makeup all over his face, often leaving his face with a rather orange-looking or bronze-looking appearance. If Trump ever fails to apply that makeup, and there arises TV footage of him "napping" in the Oval Office while having a pale-looking face, that will tend to corroborate the hypothesis suggested in this post. 

Quite a few articles claim to show pictures in which Trump appears to have swollen ankles. Swollen ankles involving edema are a symptom of heart failure, and cardiogenic syncope and heart failure are strongly associated. I asked Google this: "Is cardiogenic syncope associated with heart failure?" I get this answer from an AI overview: 

"Yes, cardiogenic syncope is strongly associated with heart failure. It is a dangerous form of fainting caused by heart-related issues, such as severe arrhythmias or impaired pumping function, and is a major, independent predictor of sudden death in patients with advanced heart failure."

The latest report with a headline of "Trump, 79, Falls Asleep Seconds After Speaking in White House Event" may be particularly suggestive of the hypothesis I here propose. The likelihood of falling asleep is inversely related to a person's alertness and state of mental interest or engagement, with the act of falling asleep much more likely to occur in someone bored or not doing anything important.  So it seems very unlikely that a person would ever fall asleep "seconds after" publicly speaking. Conversely, cardiogenic syncope occurs unpredictably, with its timing having no connection to a person's level of alertness or how socially engaged he was in the past minute. 

They Said They Left Their Bodies

 In general professors are extremely poor about studying reports of paranormal phenomena, reports of extraordinary human abilities and reports of extraordinary human experiences. In the rare cases when a professor attempts to research such matters, he or she will typically use some incompetent search strategy.  A professor will typically search for some topic using only a search of published scientific papers. That is not a very good strategy when searching for reports of the three types of things mentioned above, because most reports of such things do not end up in scientific papers, but appear in publications such as newspapers, books and periodicals. 

It is not true that reports published in scientific papers are in general more reliable than reports published in newspapers, books and periodicals. I can think of endless reports I have read in newspapers and periodicals that met very good standards of evidence, by giving first-person accounts of experiences that occurred a short time ago, with named witnesses, named dates of observations and named places of observations. Conversely, scientific papers typically fail to follow good standards for reporting observations, because they tend to use a passive voice without mentioning specific observers, and they usually fail to specify exactly where and when an observation occurred. When reading some scientific paper, you may ask: who was the person who made some crucial hard-to-get-right observation that an entire paper hinges upon -- some professor who has used some fancy piece of equipment many times, or merely some newly admitted graduate student who may have been fumbling around when using the equipment the first time? We can't tell, because scientific papers are always using the passive voice, in a way that no specific observer is mentioned. For example, in scientific papers we do not read sentences such as,  "On July 18, 2024 in Room 203 of the Cornell Neuroscience Lab, John Jacobsen tested the mice using a Morris water maze."  Instead we read passive voice sentence such as "The mice were tested using the Morris water maze."

Let us look at some periodical accounts of out-of-body experiences, reports that were obtained using the search phrase "out-of-the-body experience." Before about 1975, this phrase was more popular than the term "out-of-body experience," which has become the more common phrase in the past several decades. 

In the 1965 newspaper account here, TV personality Hughie Green says this about his experience in a car crash:

In the 1963 account here, a baron (Lord Ogmore) recalls an out-of-body experience:

The 1971 newspaper account below (which you can read here) discusses research by a South African researcher named J. C. Poynton. The terms "astral travel" and "astral projection" are terms for out-of-body experiences. Click on the image to read it better. 

On page 62 of the January 26, 1934 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we have the account below of an out-of-body experience:

"A correspondent, Mrs. F. Shepherd, sends us an account of the following out-of-the-body experience. ' I had had a severe shock,' she writes, ' when I suddenly noticed that I was breathing in a strange way, and with the last conscious breath I found myself slipping out of the top of my head. I was an exact counterpart of the body that lay upon the bed. I could see that it had its eyes and mouth closed, and that I was connected with it by some kind of cord. I tried in vain to make myself known to the people in the room, who took no notice of me whatever. My mind was very active; I wished to recover the use of my body, and knew that in order to enter it again I must get round to the foot end of the figure. Movement was difficult in what appeared to be a very heavy atmosphere, but eventually I reached the right position ; whereupon I seemed to dissolve into a quick-silver-like fluid and slipped into my body by the toes. I advanced until I reached the centre of the body where the cord was fixed, after which I was my corporeal self once more.' "

In the 1977 article here, Joan Kron reports on research into out-of-body experiences. She states that she had several herself, stating this:

In the 1968 article here, we read of a large study of many people who had out-of-body experiences. 

At the link here, we have a speaker claiming that when she asks her audience how many have had an out-of-body experience, she gets about one third of the audience raising their hands. 

In 1968 there appeared the book Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Celia Green, the Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford University. Registered users at www.archive.org can read the book here. In 1966 an appeal had been made by radio for accounts of people who had such experiences. About 400 responses were received. Two questionnaires were sent to these people, and 326 replied to the first, with 251 to the second. 

On page 22 we have these statistics: about 70% reported only one out-of-body experience, about 9 percent reported 2 such experiences, about 5%  reported three such experiences, about 2% reported four such experiences, and about 21% reporting six or more such experiences. On page 24 we have a striking account by someone put in a glass cubicle in a hospital while suffering from a high fever. She reports being out of her body for 8 or 9 days, feeling no pain. She says, "I was no longer in my body but up in the corner of the cubicle watching the nurses flitting about." 

On page 39 Green says, "Many subjects comment on their feelings of well-being and reality in their new position apart from their physical body, and there are no counter-instances, that is to say, no subjects remark on having felt incomplete, unsubstantial or unreal in their new position."

The Mistakes and Myths of Milner's Manifesto

Yuri Milner is a super-rich scientist, entrepreneur and investor who has donated millions to various projects such as the Breakthrough Prize and the Breakthrough Listen project, one of many SETI projects searching for radio signals for extraterrestrial civilizations. Milner has published a philosophical manifesto he calls the Eureka Manifesto. You can access it by reaching the page here. 

You would think that someone with so many millions would be able to put up a bug-free web site that made it real easy for people to read his manifesto. But when I go to the site using a PC, I experience some difficulties. The manifesto is introduced on a short page with a Read button at the bottom. Clicking on that button takes me to a blank page with nothing to read. 

There is a Download button that takes me to a page that offers four download choices. Clicking on PDF, I do not get sent to a web page of his site displaying a PDF file I can read. All that has gone on is that a PDF file has been downloaded to my Documents folder. If I remember to look at some list I can get in the top right corner of my Chrome browser, I can read that download. But how many potential readers, we may wonder, simply give up in frustration?  

Let's look at some of the mistakes and myths in Milner's Eureka Manifesto.

Page 20: "The journey from the little sphere to the mind that imagines it – and beyond – is the story of everything. The Universal Story. The beats of this story are a series of 'phase transitions': critical changes of state, as when water freezes to ice. These transitions shaped order out of chaos."  

Here we have an introduction to the utterly lame explanation attempts that Milner will give. He will be attempting to explain great leaps of biological organization and mental capabilities by appealing to the physics concept of "phase transitions."  A phase transition is a change of state like what goes on when water freezes or ice melts. It makes no sense to try to explain great leaps of biological organization by describing them as phase transitions. Frozen water is not very more impressively organized than liquid water; and neither liquid water nor frozen water have any functional information.  So you don't do anything to credibly explain some great biological transition requiring a huge amount of new functional information (such as the transition from non-life to life) and a huge leap in organization by saying that it was a phase transition.  

Phase transitions

Page 22: "And now, on the third planet out, a new phase transition begins. Deep in an ocean or on some ancient shore, spiral-shaped ribbons of molecules, sealed inside bubbles, have found a way to copy themselves. As the bubbles – the first cells – move through their environment, they do something that’s never been done before, possibly anywhere in the Universe. Reacting to the conditions around them, absorbing nutrients and avoiding hazards, they develop an ability to model the outside world."

 We have here neither an accurate description of the first living cell nor a credible description of how it could have originated.  The language is very misleading language making a self-reproducing cell sound billions of times simpler than it is. And a cell does not have an ability to model the outside world. A self-reproducing cell is something exponentially more complex than a mere bubble with DNA. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention. The origin of something that complex would be something hugely too complicated to be described as anything like any of the "phase transitions" known to physicists. 

Milner is a physicist. I could make a joke here along the lines of: "To a carpenter, everything is a hammer or a nail; and to a physicist everything is a phase transition."  

 Page 23: "The cell, tiny and simple as it is, holds a sliver of knowledge."

Even the simplest self-reproducing cell is something of very great functional complexity, not something "simple." The amount of genetic information required to have the simplest self-reproducing cell is equal to the functional information in about 100 pages of text, each having hundreds of words. That is much more than "a sliver of knowledge."

Page 23: "For over a billion years, there are only single cells. Then comes a leap in complexity – another phase transition: one cell gets inside another and joins forces with it."

This passage refers to the origin of eukaryotic cells, vastly more complex than the simplest type of cells, called prokaryotic cells. Darwinists and materialists have no credible story to explain such a huge leap in complexity, which has been compared in the leap in complexity of making an upgrade from a tiny shack to the mansion of a multi-millionaire such as Milner. Such a huge leap forward in organization and information cannot be credibly explained by the idea that "one cell gets inside another." 

Page 23: "Colonies of cells begin to cohere, acting as single organisms."

Referring to the origin of multicellular life, this is the most vacuous hand-waving. The origin of visible multicellular organisms is something trillions of times too hard to explain by such "the cells started to stick together" explanation. Currently biologists have no credible explanation for how there could have occurred a transition from microscopic life to large visible organisms with complex anatomy. 

Page 23: "Organisms comprising trillions of cells develop sensory organs and nervous systems, then eventually brains – organs that can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions."  

We have here here no explanation as to how such wonders of biological innovation could have occurred. There is no evidence that brains "can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions." We merely know that humans can create models that predict things.  No neuroscientist has a credible explanation of how a brain could create such models or make predictions. 

Page 23: "The next phase transition occurs when intelligent animals find ways to communicate, spreading models beyond the individual brain."  

The reference is to the origin of language, something that Darwinists have no credible explanation for. Describing it as a "phase transition" does nothing to explain it. 

Page 30: "The simplest cell already had part of the Story to tell, written in its genes. A tiny part, true – a fragment of a sentence, describing a droplet of ocean on a primeval planet. But as genes built brains and brains built cultures and cultures built a shared store of knowledge, more and more fragments became legible."

The description of the information content in the simplest cell is wrong by a factor of about 10,000 times. The amount of functional information in the simplest cell is equivalent to about the information content in a book of 100 pages -- vastly more than "a fragment of a sentence." The claim that "genes built brains" is false. As discussed here, DNA and its genes do not specify how to make any human organ,  do not specify how to make up  any of the tissues that make up organs, do not specify how to make up  any of the cells that make up tissues,  do not specify how to make up  any of the organelles that make up such cells, and do not specify how to make up any of the protein complexes that are crucial to the construction and maintenance of cells. 

Page 31: "In the dance of chance and time, we found ourselves in a form that can explore and understand. This is our gift. Our precious birthright. To be awake. To have minds formed from matter. To look out at the world and understand." 

Chance and time are not credible explanations for human bodies, and nothing Milner has said bears any resemblance to a credible  explanation for human bodies or any type of simpler life. A mind is an immaterial thing, and is not "formed from matter."  

Page 32: "We have the opportunity to embody that extraordinary transformation, to embrace it and carry it forward into the future. To stay awake. To explore and understand our Universe. That means all of us."

Because of all of the many ocean-sized shortfalls in our current understanding of matter, life and mind, it is  overconfidence to claim that we currently can "understand our universe." 

Page 32: "Without our commitment to the Mission, the Universe could close its eyes and drift back into sleep."

This statement makes no sense at all. 

Page 36: "It seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations that will keep expanding the scope of their discoveries."

Nothing in the manifesto justifies such a statement, nor does anything in the explanation of Darwinists or materialists. Darwinian evolution cannot occur until life exists, so evolution does not "create life" from nonlife. Nor does evolution create minds or civilizations. Human minds are not credibly explained by human brains, for reasons very abundantly discussed at my site here.  Human minds are not credibly explained by the theory of evolution by so-called natural selection.  This shortfall was explained at length by the co-founder of that theory (Alfred Russel Wallace) in his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," which you can read here and here.  Milner donated  many millions to the Breakthrough Listen project, which spent quite a few years searching thousands of stars looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. No such signs were found. This is the opposite of what we would expect to happen if "it seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations."

Page 37: "Let’s step back to that moment on primeval Earth when two cells merged together. That union, which was the genesis of all complex life, came most likely over a billion years after the appearance of the first cells." 

This is a reference to the origin of eukaryotic cells, things a million times too complex and organized to be explained by some mere story that "two cells merged together." The claim that the origin of eukaryotic cells was "the genesis of all complex life" is hugely mistaken. Even the simplest type of cell (a prokaryotic cell) is an enormously complex system. 

Page 46: "Jill Tarter, a pioneer in the search for intelligent life, famously compared the searches undertaken in the decades since the Green Bank conference to dipping a single glass into the ocean and wondering why you don’t catch a fish." 

The history of SETI searches is by now very extensive, with very many thousands of observation hours. The entire sky has been searched multiple times by large expensive projects. So it is very misleading when SETI enthusiasts try to make us think that the search for radio signals has only just begun. To the contrary, it has been well-funded for more than 50 years. You can read my post here for a list of many of the main searches that have occurred. 

Page 53: "We now have a glimpse of the bounty of worlds the Universe has to offer. Even beyond the Earth-like planets identified so far, we know there are super-Earths, water worlds, probably planets made of diamond."

Here the manifesto incorrectly claims that there have been Earth-like planets discovered. No such discovery ever occurred. A planet should never be called Earth-like unless life has been discovered on it, and life has not been discovered on any other planet. 

Page 68:

On this page we have a Plan of Action which consists of these items:

• "invest resources into fundamental science and space exploration
•  enable artificial intelligence to drive scientific progress 
•  celebrate scientists as heroes 
•  focus education on the universal story and use the power of art to tell it 
•  spark a new enlightenment in which everyone can contribute to a shared culture of knowledge"

The "universal story" that Milner has told is one that makes no sense. Nowhere does it provide any credible explanations for any of the main wonders of biology or mind. So it would be a huge mistake to "focus education" on so bad and unbelievable an origins story. Huge problems with so-called artificial intelligence systems is that they do not really understand anything, and that such systems worsen echo-chamber effects, by making frequentist judgments of truth, in which the most common answers are treated as true. The use of such "the most common claim is true" assumptions by AI systems make them unsuitable for the job of driving scientific progress in an intelligent way. "Follies of the herd" mistakes in dogma-clinging scientist belief communities tend to be worsened by so-called artificial intelligence systems.

As for the bullet list item that we should "celebrate scientists as heroes," and the similar claim on page 69 that we should "raise their profiles and prestige," it sounds like more of what we have already too much of: the placing of scientists atop pedestals, and the crowning of scientists as Grand Lords of Explanation. Such hero worship is an obstruction to scientific progress, and a stumbling block. The placing of Charles Darwin on some high pedestal has been a gigantic mistake, blinding people to critically examining all the flaws and fables of his error-ridden effort to explain the origin of species. Instead of putting scientists on pedestals and making them the objects of idol worship, we should be subjecting the utterances of every scientist to the same critical scrutiny we apply to politicians. 

In the culture of Darwinist materialism there has been too much deceit and conceit. The deceit occurred through the nearly 100 types of deception I list in my post here. The conceit occurred when people went ego-tripping by wrongly crowning themselves as Grand Lords of Explanation, without ever deserving such a crown. 

Page 68 -- 69: "There is ultimately only one field of inquiry: the Universal Story, which contains the history of our Universe, our planet, and our civilization, including the realm of the social sciences and humanities."

This is very bad nonsense. There are very many fields of inquiry. If Milner had studied more of these fields of inquiry, he might understand some of the mistakes he has made in his manifesto. 

Based on what I read about him on wikipedia.org, Milner seems like a fine fellow who is very well-meaning and generous. It's a shame that his manifesto seems lacking in original and noteworthy thought. He sounds like someone who is much better at technological innovation and making money and philanthropy than at philosophical innovation or philosophical insight. A second effort by him might well yield much better results. Good original work in philosophy related to origins or grand questions tends to require diligent effort over long periods of time, along with a willingness to make a deep study of many fields of inquiry. 

Artemis: A Program With No Compelling Rationale

NASA has a Big New Task it is eagerly working on: an Artemis program to have  astronauts go back to the moon. This is something that was already accomplished quite a few times more than 50 years ago, when US astronauts not only orbited the moon, but walked on the moon, and drove around the moon in a little vehicle rather like a golf cart. In a 2022 post I pointed out that NASA's web page promoting the Artemis program miserably failed to articulate a convincing rationale for the mission. The moon is a lifeless rock of no real scientific interest, and its surface is a very lethal environment for reasons discussed in the infographic below. 

A recent article on the LiveScience.com site is entitled "Artemis II: NASA is preparing for a return to the moon, but why is it going back?" The article writer named Pester tries to conjure up a case for the Artemis program, but fails to make any compelling case. 

Here are some of the statements made in the article, and why they do not hold up well to scrutiny. 

• "It's also no secret that China threatens to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, and the U.S. doesn't want to fall behind." This is the old "space race" rationale used to try to justify the unnecessary Apollo program. We were told that we must spend many billions landing men on the moon, because we cannot ever let the Russians beat us in a space race.  Such a rationale was never a convincing reason for funding the Apollo program, and it is not a convincing reason for funding the Artemis mission. 
• "From a scientific perspective, humanity still has much to learn about the moon. Earth's natural satellite has a long history preserved in its rocks, and it could help researchers better understand our own planet, the solar system and the universe at large." Rock samples from the moon have already been retrieved, and such samples did not advance human knowledge in any notable way. Retrieving additional rocks from the moon will not help us better understand our planet, our solar system, or our  universe at large. And if you want to retrieve such samples, they can be retrieved at a far lower cost by unmanned robotic missions. 
• "The moon and Earth are like twins that have been dancing around each other since the beginning of the solar system around 4.5 billion years ago, said Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. This means they have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects, 'It just has this 4-and-a-half-billion-year record of what has happened on its surface' Russell told Live Science. 'We can see how affected it has been by impacts, which have also happened to the Earth, but we don't see evidence for that on the Earth so easily.' "  Oops, what a huge failure this is to explain any compelling rationale for further studying the moon. It is ridiculous to claim that Earth and the moon are like twins. Earth is a lovely planet teeming with life, and the moon is a lifeless rock. No, Earth and the moon do not "have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects." A comet or asteroid hitting the moon was not a comet or asteroid hitting Earth. Craters on the moon provide evidence of asteroid or meteor impacts in its past, but the topic of exactly what bombardments the moon received long ago is not an important scientific topic. Not 1% of the population has any interest in what type of bombardments the moon received ages ago. There are endless thousands of scientific research topics very much more important and more worthy of funding than the bombardment history of the moon, which is pretty much the topic least worthy of scientific funding. 
• "Traveling to the moon with a crew will also enable mission scientists to pursue another, perhaps more disturbing, goal of the Artemis program — investigating the effects of space travel on human physiology. The Artemis II flight is an opportunity for new studies of astronaut health, including how space travel influences the body, mind and behavior, and how those impacts could affect future missions, according to NASA." There is no need to travel to the moon to research the effect of space travel on human physiology. You can do the same type of study with astronauts orbiting Earth.  What we have learned about effects such as cosmic rays is information very discouraging to any idea of colonizing the moon (information summarized in the infographic above). Having no atmosphere, the moon is subject to constant bombardment by radiation from deep space, with the worst being cancer-causing particles called cosmic rays. So anyone living for years on the moon would be forced to live underground. 
• "Space exploration is difficult, dangerous and expensive, so NASA needs to test its systems and its astronauts on the moon before sending them to farther destinations. Establishing a lunar base could be key to traveling to Mars."  Nonsense. Establishing a base on the moon will not be a dry run for sending men to Mars. And there is no reason why humans need to go to Mars. We sometimes hear "don't put all of your eggs in one basket" rationales for colonizing Mars. If you want to have people protected against the hazards of global warming or nuclear war or an asteroid strike, it is ten times easier to build underground colonies or undersea colonies than to build bases on the moon or Mars. 
• "NASA has claimed that if it can harvest the moon's water, the space agency can use it to help make drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel — although this remains unproven."  There is virtually no water on the moon, making any "exploit lunar water resources" claims laughable.  
• "NASA has said that its moon strategy stimulates the commercial space industry and creates business opportunities in ways that could foster a lunar economy. The lunar economy currently stems from NASA working with private companies that provide commercial deliveries to support the space agency's mission. Essentially, NASA pays companies to take stuff to the moon."  This sounds like welfare for corporations, another case of the government acting to enrich giant corporations rather than doing something to help the common man keep his head above water. 
• "Moon mining has the potential to become a billion-dollar industry. The moon harbors resources like rare earth elements, which are mined for electronics on Earth, as well as a potential gold mine in its stocks of helium-3, which could eventually be used in nuclear fusion reactors to make near-limitless clean energy." There is no practical prospect of profitably mining the moon in the next two decades.  If such a thing is ever done, it would require some distant technology not available for many years, and such a possibility does not justify expenditures for Artemis in the next few years. In a European Space Agency article about the concept of extracting helium from the moon, we read, "In 2007, the theoretical physicist Frank Close famously described the concept as 'moonshine' ".  Maybe he used that word for nonsense because the helium on the moon is at very low abundances such as about 1 part per billion. 
• "If the U.S. is to win this second race for the moon, then the upcoming Artemis missions will need to remain on schedule. China wants to land its own astronauts on the moon before 2030, which is at most two years after the first Artemis lunar surface missions, assuming they are a success." More "space race" nonsense. We did not need to beat the Russians in the first "space race" to the moon, and we do not need to beat the Chinese in a second "space race" to the moon. 

After the successful launch of the Artemis II mission, which merely went into orbit around the moon, the Ars Technica site published an article entitled "Why is NASA bothering to go back to the Moon if we’ve already been there?" The author struggles to explain some convincing rationale, but all he gives is the emptiest of "handful of moonbeams" reasons. Along the way, he makes some interesting confessions such as these:

" In the end, success with Artemis II may provide a short blip of public bonhomie, but I don’t expect it to last. And with the turbulent news cycle of 2026, I expect Artemis II to be largely forgotten by most Americans before the end of April...Most polls show that as many as 90 percent of Americans don’t care about returning to the Moon or establishing a presence there."