The Real Reason Reporters Won't Talk About Trump's Mental Decline

It's not because they want him to win.

Photo by Liam Enea

When Donald Trump began his run for president in 2015, he was 69 years old. Should he win this election, he will be 82 when (or if) he leaves office at the end of a second term. He is clearly suffering from at least some age-related cognitive decline, as most people do at his age: His speeches have become more rambling and less coherent, he’s unable to give clear answers even to the most softball questions served up by friendly interviewers, he regularly forgets that he isn’t still running against Joe Biden, and his lies have grown so preposterous that it’s almost impossible to imagine even his most devoted supporters believing them. And like many elderly people who are aware of their lapses, he has developed ways of covering for them; in his case it usually involves a quick change of topic or a joke, so listeners have to struggle to keep up with the rhetorical stream and have no time to dwell on the weird thing he said a moment ago.

All that may have occurred to a degree years ago, but as time has gone on the lapses have become more frequent and glaring. So why do the elite media seem so allergic to talking about Trump’s age and mental fitness, when the evidence of an addled mind is so plain to see? Some believe the answer is “They want Trump to win,” but that’s not really what’s at work here. Whether they want Trump to win is itself a complicated question that I may address later, but that isn’t why they are ignoring the question of Trump’s cognitive state.

In short, they think Trump acts crazy, but they have decided it’s all an act, and that’s as far as they need to probe. 

Nevertheless, nearly every Trump appearance provides new examples to suggest that he is deeply unwell. Let’s take just one, from a recent event with the far-right Moms for Liberty, where he claimed that schools are performing surprise gender-reassignment surgeries against the will of both students and parents. “The transgender thing is incredible, think of it,” he said. “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And many of these childs [sic], 15 years later say, what the hell happened? Who did this to me?” 

That isn’t just hyperbole, it’s positively unhinged, in a manner so extreme that no one could defend it as the product of a sound mind. So the question is, why aren’t news organizations running screaming headlines and lengthy TV stories asking “Is Trump mentally fit to be president?” 

Remember when the president’s mental state mattered?

You can find plenty of commentary on the left about Donald Trump’s obvious cognitive decline, but the elite media has shown a pronounced lack of interest. Yet for the last couple of years, they were positively obsessed with Joe Biden’s mental acuity. They never stopped thinking about it and talking about it and writing about it, and when eventually it became impossible for even Biden’s allies to deny that he was no longer able to adequately handle the rigors of the campaign and withdrew, the reporters took a quiet victory lap. See, we were right all along, they said, both about Biden himself and about the importance of examining any president’s cognitive capacities. 

Except they no longer seem to believe the second part, that it’s part of their job to keep a close eye on whether a current or potential president has the mental wherewithal to do the job. If Trump says something particularly vulgar about Kamala Harris or changes his position on abortion for the fifth time this week they’ll pen stories about it, but if he simply shows that his mind is deteriorating, they don’t find it worthy of note, let alone a week of front-page headlines. Editors are not assigning teams of reporters to get to the bottom of Trump’s mental state. Elected Republicans are not being quizzed about it every time they talk to a journalist.

So it turns out that reporters do not hold a universally applied principle saying that presidents and presidential aspirants should be constantly assessed for their mental capacity. That was just a Biden thing, because reporters create a unique set of criteria to judge each candidate, always claiming that they are applying the same standards to all. They construct and maintain a short and distinct list of character flaws for each candidate, then interpret everything that happens during the campaign through the frame created by those flaws. 

This is not a new problem. My co-author Kathleen Hall Jamieson and I wrote about it in a book we published in 2003, The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World, in which we examined the coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign. In that race, since Al Gore was supposedly a liar and George W. Bush was supposedly dumb, Gore was free to say dumb things (as he did every now and again, and as we all do from time to time) without any reporters bothering to take note, let alone rush to tell their editors they had a big story. Likewise, Bush was free to lie without any of the journalists covering him writing stories about how he might in fact be a profoundly dishonest character, and that might have implications — which it did, oh boy did it ever — for the kind of president he’d be. The character flaw frame for each candidate might as well have been cast in iron. 

In the same way, “old” was the knock on Joe Biden, but not on Donald Trump. Which meant that every time Biden appeared in public, reporters closely scrutinized his walk, the sound of his voice, his affect, and both what he said and how he said it. If he forgot a name, struggled with a word, or sounded raspy, they were sure to include those details in their stories as evidence that “new questions are being raised” about his age. 

That doesn’t mean Biden’s age wasn’t a legitimate story, but it did mean that nothing bearing on the question of whether he was mentally fit would be ignored. But “Is Trump too old?” has never been a question reporters asked. There are other character flaws that frame their coverage — whether Trump is cruel and petty and easily distracted and corrupt, sure. But his age has not been something to which they’ve given much thought.

How “Trump says crazy stuff” lets him off the hook

That isn’t to say the the average political reporter thinks Trump’s cognitive abilities are top-notch (“Person! Woman! Man! Camera! TV!”). It’s just not a question they ask, and certainly not one they think their coverage should revolve around. In fact, “Trump says crazy stuff!” serves as both an excuse not to report the things he says and to describe them in ways that divert attention from his mental state. Sometimes it’s the justification for dismissing his more disturbing comments (“What else is new, Trump said something crazy, we’re not going to do a story on that”), and sometimes it provides an interpretive structure in which the comments are reported.

When it’s the latter, the prevailing frame — something like “On Campaign Trail, Trump Makes Provocative Statement” — interprets the things he says as entirely performative. The deranged things that come out of his mouth are assumed to be a strategic choice, and the reporter’s job is to explain the strategy behind it, not ask whether the man is losing his mind. 

So when he says that schools are performing gender reassignment surgeries, we get “Trump leans into culture wars with Moms for Liberty at D.C. summit,” “Trump questions acceptance of transgender people as he courts his base at Moms for Liberty gathering,” and “Trump amps up culture war agenda with Moms for Liberty appearance.” It would have been far more accurate for the headlines to read “Increasingly detached from reality, Trump spins bizarre tales,” or “Trump’s transgender fantasies raise new questions about mental state.” But they didn’t. 

I say all this by way of explanation, but there is nothing about it that can’t change if the elite news media simply decide to change it. They can judge candidates by the same standards; if mental fitness matters for one, then it matters for all. They can treat Trump not just as a performer doing an act, but as someone who could be even more dangerous than he already is if he continues to decompensate. They just have to decide to tell the truth.