If things go the way I hope they go in this election, it may well turn out that Sunday’s terrific New York Times piece by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman on Donald Trump’s age and fitness for office could stand as the single most important piece of journalism in this election. If you’ve been reading me and Greg Sargent and Parker Molloy and our breaking news desk, then you know that The New Republic has been pretty obsessive about the topic of Trump’s mental fitness—and more importantly about the media’s general refusal to discuss it.
This is what has come to be known as the “sane-washing” of Trump: the practice by media outlets of covering him like a normal candidate and not telling their audiences in detail about all the monstrous, false, disjointed, and plain old nonsensical fountains of gibberish he serially spouts at every public appearance he makes.
We (and others) have been critical of the press in general and the Times in particular, mainly because the Times is still the most important news outlet in the country. So let’s give credit where it’s due. The Baker-Freedman piece was a deeply reported analysis that wasn’t afraid to say things most mainstream outlets won’t say. I’d also note that in recent days, Michael Gold, the paper’s Trump correspondent, has written a couple pieces that are more blunt and direct in calling out Trump’s lies and quoting some of his more outrageous comments.
The Sunday Times article puts it on the line: “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought—some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own ‘beautiful’ body. He relishes ‘a great day in Louisiana’ after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is ‘trying to kill me’ when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.”
That’s just for starters. The gist of the piece argues—with statistical analyses of Trump’s tropes and speech patterns—that his rhetoric is very different from what it was in 2015 and 2016. Which is to say, it’s worse in every way: more long-winded, more disconnected, more rambling; also coarser, far more prone to swearing. In sum, the article is devastating about whether Trump, who is now the old one in the race and who would be 82 at the end of a second term, is simply capable on a mental level of doing the job of president.
So, good job, New York Times. But now the question is, will this just stop here?
It had better not. I hope the Times keeps finding ways to raise this question, and I hope other mainstream outlets follow. The first part of that equation shouldn’t be hard for the simple reason that Trump will keep cranking out material. He has been, in case you’ve missed it, absolutely insane with regard to his lies about Hurricane Helene. He claims that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have denied money to the affected states because they’ve spent it all coddling undocumented immigrants. He actually said this. (For the record, it’s not true.) Another line is that they’ve denied aid to red parts of the states but sent money to blue parts. No, idiot, that’s you!
The press has done a decent job of covering the Helene-related lies. But again, this isn’t just a question of lies. It’s a question of whether he’s all there in the head. And it’s a relevant question because Trump makes it relevant every time he opens his mouth.
Whatever I thought of the policies of George W. Bush or John McCain or Mitt Romney, I knew one reliable thing about all of them. They weren’t going to start talking about poor misunderstood Hannibal Lecter. They weren’t going to go on WTF riffs about “vicious” mosquitoes and the Panama Canal or how Cary Grant looked in a bathing suit. They didn’t frequently get wrong what city or state they were in or say “Minneananpolis” or forget who they were running against.
But Trump has done all that and much, much more while campaigning for president. And there’s surely more coming. As George Conway tweeted Sunday morning:
The great thing about this lengthy New York Times report about @realDonaldTrump’s extensive cognitive decline is how he’s going to react to it.
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 6, 2024
A key word in the Times article was “disinhibition.” It’s just what it sounds like—the loss of inhibition for one reason or another. It means that as you age and your brain starts to go, you become more yourself.
With most older adults, that’s harmless—they become a little more stubborn, a little more direct. But this is different. Does America need a Donald Trump in the Oval Office who is more himself? It means more people will be arrested, more laws will be broken, more constitutional guardrails smashed. The mainstream media has four weeks to lead that conversation.
