What’s going on with Donald Trump’s health now?
Despite his obvious desire to be the star of the show every night at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump has instead merely spent the past two nights reminding us that he can barely read or understand a simplistic script that his handlers put in front of him, and he seems barely there when he lifelessly lumbers to and from the podium.
Donald Trump’s health is in freefall. Everyone in the media knows it. Most of them are unwilling to say it. It raises the question of why. Sure, we don’t have an official diagnosis for precisely why Trump’s health is failing. But that’s only because Trump keeps having quack doctors issue laughable lies about everything from his cognitive abilities to his weight. Shouldn’t that alone justify some prying into Trump’s health on the part of the media?
The trouble is, at the end of the day, the media still wants to be seen as having been fair to both sides. If one side is objectively doing worse than the other, then “fair” coverage should result in one side being accurately and factually portrayed as worse than the other. But because the average consumer of political news doesn’t know enough to understand that, the media is always worried about being seen as biased in favor of the side that’s less scandalous.
That brings us to Donald Trump. Everything about him is a scandal. He’s a racist. He’s a sexual assaulter. He’s a financial criminal. He’s guilty of negligent homicide in a pandemic. He’s a traitor. He’s incompetent across the board. He’s all of these things, all negative, and the media has to spend all day hammering home all these negatives. If they start talking about Trump’s failing health on top of it, the dummies in the middle might interpret this as piling on, and therefore “biased” coverage.
So Donald Trump gets a pass on the fact that he’s visibly 75% senile and appears to be in life threateningly bad physical health. People see that he’s near death when they watch him on TV. But when the media completely ignores it, people end up wondering if they’re the only one seeing it, or if they’re imagining it.
Nevermind that Hillary Clinton displayed a health issue on one day of her 2016 campaign, and the media made a month long narrative about it. Nevermind that any time Joe Biden randomly misspeaks – something he’s been doing since his youth – the media asks if he’s too old to be President. This isn’t about facts or fairness. It’s about pandering to the dumbest of viewers in the middle. If the media would just acknowledge Donald Trump’s collapsing health, he might not even be in the race by election day. But the media doesn’t want to be seen as being “biased” by pointing out yet another Trump scandal.
