The media is finally focusing on something it should have been focused on all along
After Donald Trump spent the weekend accusing “Speaker of the House” Nikki Haley of being at fault for the January 6th attack, I wrote that it was hopefully the viral moment that would prompt the major media outlets to finally make Trump’s worsening senility a headline story. It turns out we may indeed have turned that corner.
For instance, on Monday morning, MSNBC’s Morning Joe did a whole thing about how badly Trump’s cognitive abilities are failing. The show also mocked House Republican Elise Stefanik for trying to pretend that Trump’s senility was just some instance of randomly misspeaking.
This is kind of funny, if you think about it. Even as Donald Trump’s senility has been getting visibly worse for a couple years now, the media has continually pretended that his various senile moments were merely a matter of him misspeaking. But now that the media is finally ready to acknowledge Trump’s senility, the media is mocking other people who are trying to pretend that Trump’s senility isn’t senility.
But hey, we’ll take it. As I’ve been saying all along, if Trump’s senility becomes the dominant story in politics, then he’s finished. It would be one thing for the Republicans to hand Trump the nomination at the convention even if he’s a convicted criminal by then. But to hand the nomination to a convicted criminal who’s widely seen as totally senile? That would be a much bigger leap.
We’ll see if the media sticks with it. The last few times the media has dipped its toe into the “Trump is senile” waters, it’s quickly retreated from the story. I’ve written that it was because too few audience members on either side wanted to hear about Trump being senile. But while Trump’s core base will want to stick with him even if he’s up there smearing Jello on his podium, the mainstream public finally seems ready to hear about it. Of course Trump helped that along by saying something so embarrassingly senile that it may have jarred the public into being ready to accept the notion. But thanks to his ongoing cognitive decline, Trump was always going to start having moments like that eventually.
At this point we all need to start pushing the media as hard as possible to continue making Trump’s senility a headline story. To that end, one can hope that Trump will continue to say more senile things that give the media new material to work with. Let’s keep in mind that if Trump’s senility becomes (and remains) the big story in politics, it’ll finish him off more quickly than anything else can.
