The Media and Trump's Spiraling Decline

Long before he came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency Donald Trump was a malignant narcissist with a questionable grip on objective reality and an inability to tell the truth on just about any topic or issue. In the nine years since, Trump has declined mentally and become increasingly unstable.  Not, of course, that much of the media focuses and honestly reports on Trump's increasingly rambling and incoherent behavior and speech (a column in the Washington Post that looks at Trump's bizarre "interview" with Elon Musk on Monday remains a rarity). While the media launched an obsessive assault on Joe Biden's physical and mental decline which fueled the calls for him to step aside, too many "journalists" continue the pretense that Trump is normal and stupidly treat the election as a horse race and utterly fail the public which deserves a candid assessment of Trump's mental illness and decline that is spiraling before our eyes.  Indeed, had the mainstream media reported honestly on Trump in 2016 and not had an orgasmic frenzy over Hillary Clinton's emails, Trump may well have never been elected and America would have been spared the nightmare from which it still has not escaped. Another column in the Post looks at Trump's decline in plain sight and the media's ongoing failure to do its job of informing the public.  Here are excerpts: 

Trump seems unable to handle reality. His opponent is beating him by multiple metrics, especially crowd size. In response, he posted several obvious lies on Truth Social, claiming that “nobody was there” and that photos and video of Vice President Kamala Harris’s crowds were AI-generated (our own reporters were eyewitnesses to the event). As lawyer and anti-Trump commentator George Conway said on MSNBC, “He has completely lost it. This post is, beyond question, delusional. But it was also inevitable because he realizes … he’s not just running for the presidency, he’s running for his freedom.”

Trump’s nonsense is also meant to sow the seeds of doubt if the election does not go his way. He stated in the same post: “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.” As my Post colleague Philip Bump wrote, “the point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.”

Trump might be conditioning voters for another “Stop the Steal.” But then again, he might be just losing it.

A glitch-plagued X interview  . . . only made things worse. People on social media reflected shock at hearing him slur and ramble his way through a softball interview. His obsession with President Joe Biden, who is no longer running, sounds like Trump cannot cope with his actual opponents. A much less alarming performance in the debate effectively ended President Biden’s campaign.

Had the media been conscientiously covering Trump, the public would understand these bizarre outings as part of his noticeable cognitive decline. Trump’s sporadic appearances on the trail alone should be grist for the cable news shows. When they do discuss his mental state, it is often in the context of horserace politics. (Axios commented on his AI delusion: “Trump’s advisers and allies worry he’s spending so much time in an alternative reality that it’s undermining his real-world campaign.” How about asking hard questions about how a party can stand behind someone in an alternative reality?)

If President Biden held a news conference with 162 lies, resorted to laughable fabrications, sounded as bad as Trump did on X and scheduled so few appearances, a swarm of investigative pieces exploring his fitness and commentary asking whether he should leave the race would have ensued. Still, the pretense of normality persists.

It works like this: “Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, explained last month. “Therefore, it is our responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize.” When not one but multiple rants call “into question not only his fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities,” the media’s refusal to convey Trump’s unfitness amounts to misleading the public.

The worse Trump gets, the more untenable the media’s unwillingness to level with voters becomes. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “[The] false claim by Trump that Harris is generating fake big crowds with AI was a true Captain Queeg moment, maybe the most bat-guano crazy thing I’ve seen in 40 years of covering presidential elections.”

Where does this leave Republicans? The MAGA party is caught in a gloom-and-doom loop, forced to run away from the radical Project 2025 plan, defend an increasingly irrational candidate and make excuses for its unlikable, inept nominee for vice president. One wonders when we will hear and see reports about “Republican panic!” or “Could Republicans dump Trump?” Let’s get real: That sort of coverage is reserved for Democrats. Alas, whatever horserace contest the media continues to present bears little resemblance to the jaw-dropping reality before our eyes.