For many months, media critics and liberal Democrats have insisted that Donald Trumpās mental unfitness for the presidency isāor should be treated asāa big and important news story in and of itself. If President Bidenās age merited extensive, focused coverage because his fitness for the job was naturally of interest to voters, goes this critique, then surely Trumpās 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 hasāin a moment of striking candorācalled out his colleagues for failing to take Trumpās mental state seriously as a story in its own right.
āWe have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency of the United States,ā Mike Barnicle, who served as a longtime columnist for The Boston Globe and other newspapers, said on [TV ]Morning Joe early Wednesday. Barnicle continued that Trump frequently says āderangedā things in public that āyou wouldnāt repeatā on āAmerican televisionā or āin front of your children.ā
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The judgment that Trump is āout of his mindā might strike some newsroom denizens as loaded, opinionated language. And surely some of them would reject Barnicleās critique by noting that they do often cover Trumpās wild-eyed utterances.
But we should pause to appreciate Barnicleās deeper, underlying point here. Itās that merely covering each of Trumpās hallucinatory claims as news items, even if that includes aggressively fact-checking them, doesnāt do justice to the much bigger story thatās unfolding right at the end of all of our noses.
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Trump is rather obviously profoundly mentally ill, and itās long past time for that to be noted every single time he goes off on another of his delusional rants.
Exactly as noted in the article, itās not even enough to fact check him (though that should be done as a matter of course) because itās not just that so much of what he says is false. The much more significant fact is that so much of what he says is insane. Itās not ideas and beliefs shaped and presented by a rational mind, but the disjointed ravings of a lunatic, and thatās exactly how it should be treated.