Donald Trump Is Completely Incoherent and the Press Is Giving Him a Pass

Perhaps the best example you will find of how the national press puts their thumb on the scale is how they have framed the question of age in this presidential race. An 81-year-old president making a gaffe every time he opened his mouth is certainly newsworthy, but Joe Biden’s senior moments became the entire focus of the national press earlier this year. They piggybacked off the anxiety evinced by liberals watching their supposed “safe” candidate tank a winnable election, and the press turned it into a genuine frenzy.

So why are they so quiet about a 78-year-old former president also having completely incoherent moments? Where is the hysteria around responses like this that demonstrate a total lack of understanding of one of the most pressing issues facing Americans today?

Q: What specific legislation will you commit to to make child care affordable?

Trump: Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka… But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about… pic.twitter.com/v8gqLUHS2v

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— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 5, 2024

This clip of Trump rambling about San Franscico then pivoting on a dime to talking about “horribly treated” presidents is the kind of stuff that makes you wonder whether he’s genuinely all there or not.

Trump says that he has been treated worse than any president in history and suggests the assassination attempt against him was the fruit of a conspiracy pic.twitter.com/hWhY75biRu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2024

And yet, if you search for “Donald Trump age” you find a fraction of articles from mainstream media and major newspapers talking about his clear incoherence as a serious problem. In fact, you can find articles in Politico like this, which downplay Trump’s age, suggesting that “it might matter.” Meanwhile, Politico has no shortage of “age issue” related articles about Joe Biden dating back to last year. This is what manufacturing a narrative looks like.

To be clear, the narrative is not that Biden is too old to be president. That’s a factual statement anyone could conclude after his disastrous debate performance. But the narrative being manufactured is that Biden’s age is a unique problem that the other candidate three years his junior does not share, despite the fact that Donald Trump now is the oldest candidate to ever run for president. It’s clearly an issue for both of them, as evidenced by polling, but you would not know that given how the press covers Trump’s age. Only Biden gets the hysteric treatment.

The root of this manufactured narrative by the press is them completely giving up on covering Trump like a normal candidate. They gave him billions in free media in 2016 and just shrugged their shoulders over his mounting incoherence as soon as he came into office, allowing him to spew lies nonstop as he figured out how to defeat their vacuous form of “journalism.” Because Trump simply just says whatever is at the top of his mind, a different set of rules has been created for him in the press as they have forfeited this battle to hold him to any kind of journalistic standard. In fact, Trump functions as something like their assignment editor, as evidenced by Dana Bash’s airheaded question about Trump’s racist attack on Kamala Harris.

It’s pretty rich to hear the press clamoring for Kamala Harris to detail her policies when the press has demonstrated very little interest in holding Trump to the same standard. If you sent the transcript of any of Trump’s rambling quotes to a mainstream outlet and said it came from Joe Biden, they would write a very different headline than if they thought it came from Donald Trump. The press has always given Trump a pass on his nonstop lies and general incoherence, but now that he is clearly slowing down with age and exacerbating these issues, the special set of depraved rules the press has created for him is even more stark.