Finally: Top Journo Erupts at Media for Ignoring Trump’s Mental State

For many months, media critics and liberal Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency is—or should be treated as—a big and important news story in and of itself. If President Biden’s age merited extensive, focused coverage because his fitness for the job was naturally of interest to voters, goes this critique, then surely Trump’s visible incoherence, cognitive impairment, inability to cogently discuss the simplest public matters, and increasingly strange flights of fantasy deserve equivalent treatment.

This argument has never received an even remotely serious hearing from newsroom leaders at big media organizations. But it might have just become a bit harder to ignore, now that a well-respected veteran journalist has—in a moment of striking candor—called out his colleagues for failing to take Trump’s mental state seriously as a story in its own right.

“We have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency of the United States,” Mike Barnicle, who served as a longtime columnist for The Boston Globe and other newspapers, said on Morning Joe early Wednesday. Barnicle continued that Trump frequently says “deranged” things in public that “you wouldn’t repeat” on “American television” or “in front of your children.”

“How did we get here?” Barnicle asked. Then he pointed a finger at his media colleagues. “Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say, about submarines, and sharks, and electric batteries,” Barnicle said. He noted that such things are “not really covered” as a window into “who the man is” or a sign that he’s “out of his mind.” Watch the whole thing:

.@mikebarnicle: "Today we have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get re-elected to the presidency of the United States. How did this happen?... How did the Republican Party get here?" pic.twitter.com/SHTDwQJ5ya
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) September 4, 2024

The judgment that Trump is “out of his mind” might strike some newsroom denizens as loaded, opinionated language. And surely some of them would reject Barnicle’s critique by noting that they do often cover Trump’s wild-eyed utterances.

But we should pause to appreciate Barnicle’s deeper, underlying point here. It’s that merely covering each of Trump’s hallucinatory claims as news items, even if that includes aggressively fact-checking them, doesn’t do justice to the much bigger story that’s unfolding right at the end of all of our noses.

Let’s try to state what should be obvious: Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness. Real journalistic resources should be put into meaningfully covering it from multiple angles, as often happens with other big national stories of great consequence.

Is this happening right now in any meaningful sense? Is there even a debate going on in America’s top newsrooms about whether it should be happening right now?

Yes, you can point to isolated examples of such coverage. The New York Times had a good piece recently that focused on Trump’s use of vulgar language against Vice President Kamala Harris. Another Times piece in July analyzed Trump’s racist tropes and put them in broader historical context. There are more pieces like these out there.

But what’s really at issue here is whether the media—as an institution, and in a comprehensive sense—is treating Trump’s mental state as an overarching and critically important factor in determining whether he is fit to be president.

For one thing, even if some of Trump’s whacked-out statements get covered, many do not. At a recent Moms for Liberty event, Trump unleashed a rant about schools supposedly forcing kids to undergo sexual reassignment surgery that was truly deranged and comprehensively detached from reality. As The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky points out, in some prominent coverage of the event, this wasn’t even mentioned at all.

More broadly, to grasp what coverage of Trump’s mental unfitness might look like, try comparing what little there is of it to coverage of President Biden’s age before his exit from the race. In a useful intervention, the Times’ Jamelle Bouie notes that in the latter case, the media adopted the premise that Biden’s age mattered precisely because it went to Biden’s core mental capacity “to do the job as president,” thus meriting extensive journalistic attention.

But if so, then why don’t things like Trump’s obvious cognitive impairment, his frequent inability to speak and think coherently, his resolute refusal to acquire minimal baseline knowledge on many consequential issues, his tendency to invent things on the fly that are wildly disconnected from reality, his intense narcissism, his deliberate lying and bigotry and misogyny—to name just a few traits—also go to his core mental and characterological capacity to do the job as president?

My suspicion is that some news professionals intuitively see cognitive impairment from age as an objectively verifiable condition, whereas identifying some of these other traits might require a value judgment that flouts conventions of neutrality. But that’s a weak excuse. Serial incoherence, lack of basic curiosity, pathological dishonesty, a tendency toward sadistic verbal abuses of many different kinds—all these things can also plainly be evaluated through the prism of whether they might impair someone from performing the job of president effectively. Journalists can say what they know to be true about Trump’s qualities on all these fronts.

To illustrate this, I’ve taken 10 prominent headlines on stand-alone stories that ran about Biden’s age before he dropped out. I’ve rewritten them (links to the originals are included) around Trump’s mental unfitness. Reading these, you can see how journalists might spend much more time talking to associates of Trump who privately witness his unbalanced behavior, or questioning Trump himself directly about his mental lapses, or analyzing polls showing that majorities see Trump’s pathological lying as concerning in a president, or looking at specific rants as symptomatic of Trump’s much larger infirmities:

Are these headlines really stretches, based on all we’ve seen? I submit that they are not. Note that all of these treat signs of the subject’s questionable mental fitness for the presidency—and the politics surrounding them—as themselves being the real news. How often do you see headlines like this? Why don’t we see more of them?

Mike Barnicle’s eruption at his colleagues has put all this squarely on the table. It’s time to take it a lot more seriously—before it’s too late.