The progressive New Republic, spring-boarding off an explosive take on Donald Trump‘s mental health by veteran journalist Mike Barnicle, is criticizing the lack of mainstream media coverage concerning the mental fitness of the Republican presidential nominee.
Trump’s increasingly erratic rhetoric and chronic fabulations demand far more scrutiny, critics say, and Trump’s bizarre “incoherent” ramble at the New York Economic Club this week sounded ever louder alarm bells.
[Trump dementia bells were rung earlier this year when a senior lecturer in the Psychology Department at Cornell University and in the Psychiatry Department at Weill Cornell Medicine claimed Trump’s intermittent phonemic paraphasia signaled “signs of early dementia.” As for TNR’s springboard, Barnicle said on Morning Joe: “We have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency of the United States.”]
TNR contends 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.”
In an article titled Finally: Top Journo Erupts at Media for Ignoring Trump’s Mental State, the magazine claims that the “bigger story” is that Trump’s mental faculties have dangerously diminished — a problem that supersedes political differences. (But, of course, it can’t supersede them — since everything is political — and Trump effectively turns any question into an attack.)
Getting larger is the pile of Trump critics asking members of the mainstream media to give as much consideration to the bizarre things Trump says as they gave the subject of Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity before he withdrew from the race.
[New Statesman headline on Trump: Donald Trump Is Losing It: His alarming cognitive decline deserves the scrutiny that Joe Biden received.]
Donald Trump was asked today what he’d do about child care if elected president.
This is what he said, in its entirety: pic.twitter.com/k32oHFm04B
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 5, 2024
Then this week Trump’s particularly nonlinear, off-subject response to a question about child care asked at Economic Club of New York poured gasoline on the Trump mental health fire. (See Trump’s answer below.)
Reshma Saujani, who asked Trump the question, later told CNN’s Jake Tapper that his answer showed Trump was “not fit to be President.”
Saujani asked: “Can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”
Trump:
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio [(R-Fla.)] and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.
But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.
But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.
Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.
But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.
We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”
Donald Trump
All this has contributed to the recent surge in concern that the media has no tools — and maybe less willingness — to properly cover Trump’s “weave” and unrelenting barrage of falsehoods, not to mention his refusal or inability to remain on topic.
Earlier this summer Trump’s unwieldy ramble about sharks and electrocution got a lot of attention, but the former President defends this kind of speaking style as his “weave” and dismisses his critics.
The Guardian responded to Trump’s “weave” claim with this headline: Trump rebrands his ramblings as ‘I do the weave’ – but is he just losing it?
That’s the question now being raised more forcefully: Is Trump losing it?
The former president has also begun denying things he previously acknowledged. Always comfortable with asserting untrue things and sticking to them, recent episodes of equivocation by Trump are relatively new and previously rare.
Even the far-right took Trump to task recently for his apparent waffling on his abortion stance, and then having acknowledged last week there was an altercation at Arlington National Cemetery, he later said that nothing happened there, and that the conflict was a “made-up” story.
The Atlantic, highlighting the same concern as other media outlets, wrote after Trump’s child care answer that “the biggest problem, the problem that all journalistic analysis of Trump’s response ought to lead with, is that his answer makes absolutely no sense.”
The title of The Atlantic email in the aftermath was “A new level of incoherence from Trump.”