2024 Election

Prepare for Trump to Explode as the Truth About His Cognitive Issues is Revealed, And It’s Very Serious

It's about time.

The New York Times, for all of the good reporting it’s done over the years, has seemingly glossed over something very important for a long time now.

Many of their reporters have had significant access to Trump, but they’ve all overlooked some pretty glaring stuff. Don’t get me wrong — Trump does get occasionally called out for something egregious.

But even a small publication like ours has reported on a much bigger picture. And while we may be intended for a certain audience, the fact is, what the major news outlets have been ignoring is the most important picture of all:

Trump. Is. Nuts. He’s nuts, and it’s getting worse.

Okay, so the NYT didn’t quite phrase it that way. They’re still being generous and chalking up his bizarre behavior to signs of cognitive decline. Heck, we’ve used that phrase plenty of times ourselves (okay, well I have), because the public never seems ready to accept that the news has been “sanewashing” Trump all along.

What the Times DID say, right in the subtitle of their article over the weekend, was this:

“With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.”

Even that seems kind to me, but it’s a start. Because what they mean is that we keep treating Trump’s behavior as a thing that’s normal, and it’s anything but normal.

I’m not just talking about the stations friendly to Trump, either. Greg Gutfeld didn’t bat an eye on Fox when Trump gushed about the debate audience going “crazy” when he smacked down the moderators of his event with Kamala Harris for fact-checking him too much.

Never mind that he didn’t smack down anyone, and there was no audience at the debate.

But even the nightly news stations don’t end up mentioning some pretty over-the-top stuff that Trump says and does, and then they report on his rallies and speeches as though they were held by a completely normal candidate.

I can say with certainty that if Kamala Harris held one single rally that contained even HALF the lies or gaffes that Trump regularly features, every newspaper in the world would be talking about it for months.

And maybe that’s Trump’s greatest success so far: The fact that he can say and do anything and (mostly) get away with it, save for publications that he thinks no one pays attention to.

In a way, we can almost see why it seems like the New York Times, until now, has purposely dropped the ball on this kind of reporting. They don’t want to be seen as partisan. In fact, the actual chief editor of the paper’s newsroom, Joe Kahn, said, and I quote:

To say that the threats [to] democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.

But there’s a difference between being impartial and completely ignoring things that are actually newsworthy.

You can’t have one party that insists on maintaining democracy and another party that loudly, overtly wants to eliminate it and then call the difference “partisan bickering.” It’s not. If someone says it’s raining and someone else says it’s not, it’s the news media’s job to stick their head out the window and report back.

“Defending democracy is not our job,” says Kahn. Well, yeah. It is. Literally if it’s ANYONE’S job to defend democracy when it comes to what the public knows, it’s the media’s.

It’s not like the Times doesn’t know that news outlets literally hire for the position of “fact-checker to Donald Trump” these days. The lies are constant, and they’re treated like disagreements.

Now, thanks to the insistence of reporters Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, the paper has finally published a relatively exhaustive list of reasons we should be concerned by Donald Trump’s behavior — and how it points to a pattern of mental decline that can no longer be ignored or “sanewashed.”

Right at the beginning of Baker and Freedman’s piece, you can see where they’re headed with all of this:

[The debate] was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.

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.

Let’s do a real world example, so I can better explain what I mean when I say “sanewashing” Donald Trump.

Remember that time (VERY recently) when Trump’s goons pushed around a female Army soldier at Arlington National Cemetery so they could take pictures in an area that was off-limits?

That was on August 28th.

On August 29th, the news was awash in stories about the incident, the Army’s response to the incident, the families he’d taken pictures with saying it was okay because they gave him “permission” (that they had no right to give)…

On August 30th, nothing. The 31st? Same. And there was nothing again, and there will be nothing else until the 37th of Neverember.

The Times lists a litany of things that literally everyone should have been reporting about all this time, but curiously have not:

  • Saying “The Silence of the Lip” and then referencing Hannibal Lecter at an increasingly alarming number of rallies
  • Talking about “bringing back” Johnny Carson, a late night host that’s been dead for nearly 20 years
  • Trump remembering how handsome Cary Grant was, an actor whose first movie came out in 1932, when his voters’ parents were young
  • Asking his crowd if they remember Charles Lindbergh’s landing in New York — which happened in 1927 in Paris

The authors of the Times piece even hint at one of the reasons we might be seeing this reporting now, quoting Trump’s former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews: “When he was running against Biden, maybe it didn’t stand out as much.”

Maybe Biden seemed that much more addled than Trump because he’s actually had the experience of having to remember all the names and places and events that have transpired in his 50+ years in the federal government. Maybe Biden seems older than Trump because he IS older than Trump by four years.

But Joe Biden does not bring up his beach body. Joe doesn’t swear sixty-nine times more often in his speeches than he did when he first ran, as the authors pointed out Trump does. The misspeaking? We’ve known Joe stutters for YEARS.

Trump doesn’t have any excuse. And it looks like he doesn’t have the friendly coverage of the New York Times anymore.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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