Donald Trump's incoherence makes the media's double standard hard to hide

It seems like only yesterday that the elite media were extremely concerned that President Joe Biden had mistakenly referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico. In the course of an otherwise cogent discussion of foreign affairs, he'd made that mistake in passing but it caused a huge uproar and spawned yet another round of critical reporting about his age and mental capacities. No one in the press blew off the gaffe and the substance of his comments went virtually unreported.

That press conference came in the shadow of the Hur report, in which the special counsel made a gratuitous comment about Biden being an elderly man with a bad memory. From that moment on almost every story about Joe Biden was framed in terms of his advanced age and the question of whether he was up to the job. The drumbeat continued for months until Biden's disastrous debate performance validated the narrative and it continued until the day he withdrew from the race. No one in the media cut Joe Biden any slack for his performance.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been speaking nonsense and spouting gibberish on the campaign trail and the media is covering for him by pretending that his verbal incontinence actually makes sense or by ignoring it altogether. Yes, there's been some mordant chuckling in the media over his bizarre comments about "the late great Hannibal Lecter" and his meandering tales about electric boats and shark attacks. Those stories are all delivered with a twinkling eye-roll as if to say "Oh that wacky Trump, there he goes again" as if it's just a funny little anecdote, apropos of nothing.

And it's true that he's always done this to some extent. His speeches and press conferences are surreal windows into his undisciplined, puerile mind. Despite his regular protestations that he's "like, really smart," he communicates at a 4th grade level (the lowest level of any of the past 15 presidents going back to Hoover) and uses the same handful of words and phrases over and over again to cover for the fact that he never really has any idea what he's talking about.

But Trump's getting worse and the press is failing to properly report it. Over the past couple of weeks, the problem has gotten more acute and there has been very little recognition of it. Because political reporters have normalized his unfit intellectual and emotional characteristics for so long they're just continuing to cover him as if they are perfectly ordinary even though he is rapidly deteriorating,

Trump appeared with Sean Hannity for a pre-taped "town hall" in which he wondered how anyone could be voting for Biden. He has repeatedly made that mistake, declaring that he's running against his former rival instead of his current one. That might have been an understandable gaffe in the early days after Biden withdrew but this has now been going on for a couple of months. I think we know that if Biden had done this we would have had screaming headlines.

But it's the truly demented and/or incoherent blather that's going unremarked upon and there is no excuse for it. I already wrote about his stunning declaration at the Moms for Liberty event in which he said that kids are getting transgender surgeries in school and the parents don't know anything about it. But in the write-ups of the event in all the big papers it wasn't even mentioned. Instead, we got headlines like Trump Questions Acceptance of Transgender People as He Courts His Base at Moms for Liberty Gathering and Can Moms for Liberty save Trump?

The New York Times' Jamelle Bouie smartly called this bizarre coverage (and the double standard) out in a TikTok video:

On Thursday Trump gave what was billed as an economic policy speech to the New York Economic Club. This was a room ostensibly filled with educated people who have a deep understanding of the way our economic system works. Trump attempted to deliver a rote teleprompter speech that derided Biden's economy and discussed his plans to raise more tariffs, drill baby drill and lower more taxes. It could have been finished in 10 minutes. But Trump inevitably digressed to his usual meandering stump speech which he delivered in ever desperate tones to an audience that was more often silent than not.

But the memorable moment came when he answered a question about what specific legislation he planned to propose to deal with the crisis in child care by spewing an incoherent string of words that sounded like a 4th grader giving a book report of a book he didn't read. He clearly had no idea about child care and so he reverted to the only economic policy he's ever known: tariffs, the cure-all for every economic ill.

Here is how the New York Times wrote that mess of a response up:

After his speech, Donald Trump was asked how he might address rising child care costs. In a jumbled answer, he said he would prioritize legislation on the issue but offered no specifics and insisted that his other economic policies, including tariffs, would “take care” of child care. “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.”

Does that accurately describe Trump's incomprehensible babble? I don't think so but it certainly was nice of the Times to "interpret" his comments to mean that he "insist[ed] that his other economic policies, including tariffs, would take care of child care." It's very generous of them to help him out that way otherwise people might think that Trump had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and clearly has no economic "policy" other than tariffs (which he doesn't understand either) even after having spent four years in the White House. Why, they might even conclude that he doesn't have the mental capacity to be president. I guess that would be rude.

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The New Republic's Greg Sargent wrote about this phenomenon which he calls "sane-washing" (coined, I believe, by Parker Molloy.) He speculates that the reason members of the media are unable or unwilling to characterize Trump as being unfit for the job is because they think calling Trump's ignorance and irrationality what it is would require them to make a value judgment that interferes with their self-regard as unbiased, objective observers. If that's the case, they are simply failing to do their jobs. As he writes:

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.

They could, but in all these years, Trump has dominated the political culture they never have. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Meanwhile, here's a recent headline about Vice President Kamala Harris that's indicative of the coverage she's been getting from the Times: Harris’s Early Campaign: Heavy on Buzz, Light on Policy. The piece immediately inspired a whole line of criticism about Harris' grasp of the details of the job of president. Just last night, we got this from Alex Thompson at Axios: Harris abandons 2019 pledge to ban plastic straws.

Trump's "policy" speech (talk about light!) at the New York Economic Club should have been reported as a train wreck. But the media covered for him as they so often do. He has the whole press corps acting as his ghostwriter, sanitizing his babble for the public. But Joe Biden and Kamala Harris aren't so lucky. They have to campaign and govern in a world where they are held to the standard that requires a president to be able to demonstrate his or her fitness for the presidency.