NAILED IT
Finally: Top Journo Erupts at Media for Ignoring Trump’s Mental State
Mike Barnicle’s throw-down Wednesday should open the floodgates: Coverage of Donald Trump’s mental fitness for office is not just fair game. It’s necessary.
For many months, media critics and liberal Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency is—or should be treated as—a big and important news story in and of itself. If President Biden’s age merited extensive, focused coverage because his fitness for the job was naturally of interest to voters, goes this critique, then surely Trump’s visible incoherence, cognitive impairment, inability to cogently discuss the simplest public matters, and increasingly strange flights of fantasy deserve equivalent treatment....
“We have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency of the United States,” Mike Barnicle, who served as a longtime columnist for The Boston Globe and other newspapers, said on Morning Joe early Wednesday. Barnicle continued that Trump frequently says “deranged” things in public that “you wouldn’t repeat” on “American television” or “in front of your children.”
“How did we get here?” Barnicle asked. Then he pointed a finger at his media colleagues. “Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say, about submarines, and sharks, and electric batteries,” Barnicle said. He noted that such things are “not really covered” as a window into “who the man is” or a sign that he’s “out of his mind.” Watch the whole thing:
(2:14 video)
... More broadly, to grasp what coverage of Trump’s mental unfitness might look like, try comparing what little there is of it to coverage of President Biden’s age before his exit from the race. In a useful intervention, the Times’ Jamelle Bouie notes that in the latter case, the media adopted the premise that Biden’s age mattered precisely because it went to Biden’s core mental capacity “to do the job as president,” thus meriting extensive journalistic attention.
But if so, then why don’t things like Trump’s obvious cognitive impairment, his frequent inability to speak and think coherently, his resolute refusal to acquire minimal baseline knowledge on many consequential issues, his tendency to invent things on the fly that are wildly disconnected from reality, his intense narcissism, his deliberate lying and bigotry and misogyny—to name just a few traits—also go to his core mental and characterological capacity to do the job as president?
My suspicion is that some news professionals intuitively see cognitive impairment from age as an objectively verifiable condition, whereas identifying some of these other traits might require a value judgment that flouts conventions of neutrality. But that’s a weak excuse. Serial incoherence, lack of basic curiosity, pathological dishonesty, a tendency toward sadistic verbal abuses of many different kinds—all these things can also plainly be evaluated through the prism of whether they might impair someone from performing the job of president effectively. Journalists can say what they know to be true about Trump’s qualities on all these fronts....
Mike Barnicle’s eruption at his colleagues has put all this squarely on the table. It’s time to take it a lot more seriously—before it’s too late.
Who the hell applauds that gibberish? It should be pitied, then evaluated for stroke and dementia 
Major donor and supporter, prospective admin role. Opps.