Finally: Top Journo Erupts at Media
for Ignoring Trump’s Mental State
Mike Barnicle’s throw-down Wednesday
should open the floodgates: Coverage of Donald Trump’s mental fitness for
office is not just fair game. It’s necessary.
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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:
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:
·
Behind closed doors, Trump shows
signs of slipping
·
Why the dishonesty issue hurts Trump
so much more than Harris
·
A claim about transgender Americans
puts Trump’s relentless lying back at the center of 2024
·
Trump’s penchant for unintelligible
rambling back in spotlight after verbal tirades
·
Erratic rants at rallies aren’t just
theatrics. They’re a profound and growing problem for Trump.
·
Trump’s delusions seen as
accelerating; lapses described as more common
·
Republicans bungle Trump misogyny
concerns, some critics say
·
Trump dismisses questions about
mental soundness in interview as he tries to salvage election effort
·
Trump at 78: Forceful and aggressive,
but sometimes confused and addled
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.
