Here’s what bothers me about this…
Opening arguments in Donald Trump’s criminal trial begin tomorrow morning, so I don’t know about you, but I’m in a pretty good mood. That said, before we get started, I want to touch on something that’s really bothering me right now – and will likely continue to bother me as this trial gets further underway.
Trump spent all week dozing off in the courtroom while continually passing gas. He also got up and tried to leave before the trial was even over, prompting the judge to explain to him that it was still going on. Then Trump was supposed to hold a rally last night, but it was canceled due to “wind.” Trump’s people apparently thought it was safe enough to let his supporters gather for Trump’s speech, but not safe enough for Trump to give the speech?
What we saw this past week was one piece of evidence after another pointing to Trump’s worsening dementia. He was too confused to understand that the trial was important enough to pay attention to. He was seemingly unaware of the inappropriateness of continually farting in a courtroom without asking for a recess. He was confused enough to try to leave the trial while court was still in session. And then his handlers canceled his planned rally speech under the thinnest of guises, seemingly to try to keep him from delivering a senile speech.
And yet through all of this, I haven’t seen a single mention in the media of how all these incidents from this past week are signs of Trump’s worsening dementia. He keeps falling asleep, that’s odd! Trump tried to leave in the middle of court, that’s odd! His rally was canceled at the last minute for nonsensical reasons, that’s odd too! Yet no one in the media dares to say that it’s all pretty obviously evidence that his dementia is getting worse.
This comes after Trump spent 2021, 2022, and 2023 making one semi-senile public appearance after another, with no mention from the media at all, before he got so cartoonishly senile in 2024 that the media felt it finally had to lightly cover his cognitive collapse. Then Trump’s people pulled the plug on most of Trump’s rallies in order to make the dementia headlines go away, and sure enough, the media is just about 100% playing along.
The media’s willful failure to cover Trump’s stunning cognitive collapse is infuriating, and it harms the public discourse. But it’s not surprising. It all comes back to the cold hard reality that if the media admits Trump is senile, the general public will figure out he’s finished in life, and they’ll stop nervously tuning in for their daily dose of doomsday hysteria about how Trump is going to come out on top.
If the media would just do its job – just be honest about how obviously Trump’s dementia is governing everything that happens in Trump’s life these days – Trump would be off the political stage in a heartbeat. But the media doesn’t want Trump off the stage yet. He’s too good for ratings. They’ll keep portraying him as finally having us right where he wants us, right up until the moment he finally takes the hard fall they all know is coming. In the meantime, this is why we can’t have nice things.
