Finally, the media calls out Donald Trump for his worsening cognitive decline
Yesterday there were major media reports that Senator Dianne Feinstein is suffering from worsening cognitive issues behind the scenes, raising questions about whether she should imminently retire. If the media’s sourcing is accurate, then it’s a fair question to ask. Here’s the problem with it.
If the media is now making a big deal about the reported cognitive decline of a sitting U.S. Senator, then you’d think that the obvious, severe, and public cognitive decline of the supposed 2024 Republican frontrunner for President of the United States would also be a story.
When retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman appeared on the Nicolle Wallace show yesterday, he pointed out that Donald Trump “appears to be in mental decline.” This is absolutely correct. All you have to do is watch one of Trump’s recent rally speeches, or rare interviews, to see that his cognitive abilities appear to be in far worse shape than at any point in his presidency.
What made this moment on MSNBC notable yesterday is that you don’t often hear the mainstream media acknowledging Trump’s worsening cognitive decline. This is surreal, given that the media can’t go five minutes without insisting that Trump is going to run for President in 2024, and insisting that this news is of grave danger to the nation.
If the media is going to “sound the alarm” about Trump supposedly running in 2024, you’d think his worsening senility would be one of the headlining reasons for why another Trump presidency would be so dangerous. Think about everything that was nightmarish about the previous Trump presidency. Now add him being mostly senile to the mix. All of those nightmare scenarios just got even worse. So why does the media so rarely sound the alarm about Trump’s worsening senility, when it sounds the alarm about his supposed 2024 candidacy?
The answer is right there in the question. If the media acknowledges that Trump is drifting into senility, it’ll have a more difficult time convincing the public that Trump is actually going to run in 2024. While the media knows that Trump is way too far gone for 2024, the media very much wants to spend 2022 and perhaps even 2023 chasing ratings by pretending that Trump is going to run. And because the media knows Trump isn’t going to run anyway, it doesn’t feel like it’s doing any harm by conveniently ignoring the fact that he’s senile. It’s why, whenever the media “sounds the alarm” about Trump supposedly running in 2024, it only cites reasons that make him sound like an invincible villain, not reasons that give away how obviously non-viable he’ll be by 2024.
If that sounds like an overly sinister accusation against the media, consider the other possibility. Are we supposed to believe that nearly every person in the field of political journalism believes Trump will run in 2024 and feels compelled to loudly voice grave concerns about it, but the fact that he’s senile somehow isn’t one of those concerns? Come on.
There’s no conspiracy here. There never is. It’s just that one person in the media hits on a narrative that delivers ratings and decides to keep milking it for ratings, and then in the following days and weeks the rest of the media lazily copycats that narrative to try to chase those same ratings, and eventually they’re all saying the same thing. At that point it becomes difficult for anyone in the media to point out anything that goes against that prevailing narrative. The media has almost unanimously sold the “Trump 2024” narrative so thoroughly, it takes guts to even dare to point out that the man is obviously too senile for that to be remotely realistic.
Props to Colonel Vindman for calling out Trump’s “mental decline” on MSNBC, and props to host Nicolle Wallace for letting him do it. Hopefully this is a sign that the media is finally ready to address Trump’s worsening senility, even though it does take some of the juice out of the more ratings-friendly “Trump 2024” narrative.
