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

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.