Oh come on…
After Donald Trump gave such a disastrous series of rally speeches that it resulted in wall to wall headlines about his cognitive problems, his handlers leaked to the media that they were pulling the plug on his rallies due to a campaign cash crunch. I remember laughing out loud at this at the time. We were really supposed to believe that they weren’t pulling the senile guy off the campaign trail because he’s senile, and they were instead pulling the senile guy off the campaign trail because the campaign trail was too expensive?
Yet here we are a couple weeks later, and multiple major media outlets are actually going along with the story that Trump is off the campaign trail due to budgetary reasons. I’m pretty cynical about the political media in general, but even I didn’t think they’d go along with this one.
For starters, Trump’s campaign rallies are easy profit centers. His core supporters show up, eager to shove cash at their hero. Easy money for Trump. If his campaign is indeed broke, then the answer would be more events, not fewer events.
There’s also Occam’s razor. Trump was giving completely senile rally speeches, resulting in one news cycle after another about Trump’s worsening senility. Just as these news cycles were getting so ugly that they were becoming the story of 2024, Trump’s people pulled him off the campaign trail. The obvious explanation was that they did it to try to make the headlines about his senility go away. And the obvious explanation is usually the correct one.
But the media (on both sides) really, really, really doesn’t want to talk about Trump’s senility any more than it has to. Trump has been in noticeable cognitive decline for a few years now. You could see him going gradually downhill during his public appearances in 2021, 2022, and 2023, but the media fully ignored it. It wasn’t until Trump started coming off like a full blown dementia patient in early 2024 that the media was finally willing to talk about it.
Now that Trump’s people have pulled him off the road and made a laughable excuse for it, the media is eagerly embracing that nonsensical explanation, so that it doesn’t have to touch the real story. And that story is that a de facto major party nominee for President of the United States is so deep into dementia, his handlers have taken him off the campaign trail. How long before the media acknowledges it?
