Stephen Robinson asks, yet again, why the bizarre words and deeds of the aging Donald Trump aren’t covered the same way Joe Biden’s “senior moments” were:
This past weekend, Trump’s social media feed was a wellspring of lunacy. He posted more than 50 times on Saturday alone, hurling personal attacks at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rosie O’Donnell — one of whom was never actually president. He shared an absurd AI-generated image of himself as a New York Knicks player dunking on Gov. Kathy Hochul. He boasted about defeating “disloyal” Republicans in their primaries. He continued picking fights with the Pope. He attacked the judge who ruled that he couldn’t illegally deface the Kennedy Center with his name….
Yet Trump’s unhinged posts last weekend weren’t the stuff of front-page coverage at the New York Times or Washington Post….
The rate of Trump’s manic posting on social media accelerated in May…. He resumed his unprecedented threats against a US ally with two Truth Social posts that depicted his massive face looming sinisterly over Greenland. He posted an AI image of Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in a sheep costume with vampire teeth, witing, “A Dumocrat! Don’t allow this lying sleazebag on FoxNews!”
Trump posted an image of a fighter jet seemingly about to drop a bomb with the words “Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter” written on its side. He shared an image of himself holding a shotgun over a slain rhinoceros with the menacing caption “NO RINOS”
On the subject of Trump and his predecessor, Robinson writes:
… Trump and Biden simply don’t belong in the same conversation about a president’s deteriorating mental state. As amply covered in the press, Biden was in fact old and thus experienced age-related decline, but the worst-case scenario with him at the wheel was not a potential nuclear holocaust….
Biden on his worst day was emotionally stable. Trump, on every day, is outright sadistic, and his resulting behavior is increasingly reckless. Biden’s diplomacy united allies against Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. He successfully negotiated bipartisan bills in Congress. But Trump has blown up longstanding alliances while purging dissenters and weaponizing government against his foes.
Robinson says:
… unfortunately, the mainstream media covers [Trump’s] disordered thinking as a colorful “quirk” — Trump being Trump — rather than a serious, escalating threat to the nation.
No, it’s worse than that.
The press doesn’t think Trump’s disordered thinking is a “quirk.” The press thinks Trump’s disordered thinking is a superpower. The press doesn’t cover Trump’s behavior the way it covered Biden’s because Biden wasn’t trying to impress his base with his shuffling gait and verbal stumbles. Trump clearly wants to be praised for all his late-night Truth Social shitposting. He wants likes and “re-truths,” and he gets some. The press, still unable to comprehend how a man as impolitic and unhinged as Trump won two elections, simply assumes that Trump’s rage and blather add up to a peculiar form of political genius.
In the past, it was understandable that the press might think Trump had invented a new kind of political charisma. (It wasn’t new, really — it was basically Bill O’Reilly’s assholism plus an infomercial pitchman’s aura of fake financial expertise, all of it married to a Perez Hilton-style posting addiction.) But his poll numbers are plummeting now, and he’s failing in everything he’s doing as president.
And yet the press still believes in his alleged genius. I think that’s for a few reasons.
First, his party hasn’t collapsed. Trump is admired by perhaps 35% to 38% of Americans, but he leads the party that gets approximately half the votes in America, so he seems more popular than he is.
Second, he’s still good at grabbing eyeballs. Journalists want to do good work, perhaps, but perhaps more than that, they want to do work that gets attention. I think they envy even the aging, unpopular Trump because he still knows how to go viral. They wish they were as good at it as he is (at his age!).
And finally, after decades of ref-working by the GOP, I think they feel that his habit of regularly abusing them to their faces is a punishment they deserve.
I’m serious when I say that reporters shouldn’t participate in these Oval Office gaggles. They should boycott them as a group in response to Trump’s insults, or they should walk away as a group the second he insults one of them. Obviously, there’d be consequences — but Trump would be limited in his ability to impose consequences if every top-tier non-right-wing media outlet participated in the boycott.
But they won’t, because they think taking his punches reveals their toughness. It does, but it also turns their relationship with him into an abusive marriage. The abuse makes him happy, and his base is also happy to see reporters abused. That’s a gift he and his base don’t deserve. These reporters and their bosses need to recognize that and stop giving him what he wants.
Published with permission of No More Mister Nice Blog
