Most troubling, however, is the effort of much of the news media to report on Trump as if he were a sane and normal candidate which is anything but the truth. Having first voted in the 1972 presidential election and been politically involved for decades, I have seen a lot of candidates and I assure you Trump is neither normal or sane either in my view and that of many medical practitioners. A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's bizarre press conference this past week which was an effort to grab back some headlines in the face of the plentiful coverage of the Harris-Walz ticket which is drawing far larger crowds than the far smaller Trump or Vance campaign rallies. Most of what Trump said was untrue or simply batshit crazy not that one would know it from many supposedly premier news organizations. Here are highlights from The Atlantic:
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. . . . so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.
Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states.
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. . . . . he followed all of this by going for the gold: His rallies are not just big, they’re the biggest ever.
Then things got even weirder.
Trump claimed that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said bad things about Harris while he and Trump were on a helicopter together. Oh—and the helicopter was in trouble . . . none of this ever happened. Trump may have confused Willie Brown with former California Governor Jerry Brown, with whom Trump once shared an uneventful helicopter ride.
The issue is that a former president is frighteningly delusional, and if any other candidate had done this—Biden was roasted over stories that were obscure but turned out to be true—it would dominate the news with understandable alarm about the well-being of the candidate.
Reporters might listen to Trump and then understandably be reluctant to start typing stories that must feel like spec scripts for The West Wing pieced together by a creative-writing circle . . . . Instead, The New York Times ran this headline: “Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.” The Washington Post said: “Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.” The British paper The Independent got closer with: “Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims,” but CNN went with “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference . . .
All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him. Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
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