Former President Donald Trump is growing increasingly deranged, yet the media is asleep at the wheel.
In just the span of just two weeks, Trump called for the jailing of political opponents, blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for the security lapse that led to his would-be assassin getting past Secret Service, amplified vulgar content implying his female opponent performed a sex act, called for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal and gave a nod to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and even had a public dispute with Arlington National Cemetery over a photo-op he did over the tombstones of dead soldiers. The 78 year-old ex-president may even be experiencing a form of dementia, though so far major media outlets have yet to seriously explore that possibility.
Previously, a major party nominee doing just one of the things in the aforementioned paragraph would merit wall-to-wall coverage and blaring headlines in the national newspapers of record. But there has been remarkably scant coverage beyond individual one-off write-ups of these incidents that are almost immediately forgotten in the din of the 24-hour news cycle. Meanwhile, these same outlets tend to overanalyze comparatively dull flubs by Democrats — like inferring that Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and his wife Gwen calling intrauterine insemination “IVF” was somehow dishonest — in an effort to appear objective.
Major media outlets are failing to do their basic duty of properly informing millions of Americans who are about to vote in what may prove to be the most consequential election in modern history. And the results of the beltway media’s catastrophic incompetence could reverberate for decades.
Where is the ‘Trump is too old’ narrative?
When 81 year-old President Joe Biden was still in the 2024 race, there was no shortage of breathless coverage from major newspapers about his latest gaffes. And as his June debate with Trump showed in painful detail, Biden was indeed not displaying the mental fortitude voters expect from the leader of the world’s largest economy and military (Trump, for his part, also failed to sway voters to his side, with post-debate polls showing he failed to move the needle in a positive direction for his own campaign).
Still, when faced with two candidates who were only three years apart in age, the media all but ignored Trump’s declining mental faculties and honed in on Biden’s age with laser-like focus. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent illustrated this point by posting numerous headlines from major media outlets about Biden’s age, but switching out his name for Trump’s. Sargent proposed that these same outlets simply have the same level of scrutiny for Trump as they did for Biden. Some examples include:
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Trump’s penchant for unintelligible rambling back in spotlight after verbal tirades
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Trump’s delusions seen as accelerating; lapses described as more common
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Trump dismisses questions about mental soundness in interview as he tries to salvage election effort
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Trump at 78: Forceful and aggressive, but sometimes confused and addled
And as the September debate with Harris showed, Trump’s ability to form coherent sentences only seems to be declining even more. He repeated a baseless, debunked rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were kidnapping and eating pets (city officials have said there is no evidence to support the claim), asserted that babies were routinely being executed after being born (to their credit, ABC’s moderators fact-checked that lie in real time), doubled down on his unfounded claims of the 2020 election being stolen, and suggested Harris was paying people to attend her campaign rallies.
Because the former president has yet to release detailed medical records, it’s worth asking if there’s a possible medical diagnosis he’s been concealing from voters. In 2017, the publication Stat interviewed New York City-based psychologist Ben Michaelis, who pointed out that the ex-president’s speech patterns have noticeably deteriorated in comparison to TV interviews he gave in the late 20th century. While Michaelis acknowledged that some cognitive impairment is expected for a man in his seventies, he posited that Trump is still exhibiting more decline than typically seen in men his age when paying attention to his vocabulary and syntax.
“There are clearly some changes in Trump as a speaker,” Michaelis said, adding that he noticed a “clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time,” with “simpler word choices and sentence structure.”
In August, Boston University psychology professor Andrew Budson said that Trump’s speaking abilities have diminished that much more since the first year of his presidency. He said the former president’s pattern of frequently jumping to various topics while trying to make a point is a tendency shared by ADHD patients and people who don’t get enough sleep, and could potentially even be a warning sign of dementia.
“There are absolutely changes that are occurring, without any doubt,” Budson said.
As the Daily Beast reported last month, social psychologist James Pannebaker of the University of Texas at Austin has found evidence of rapid decline in Trump’s cognitive abilities when analyzing transcripts of 35 of his speeches between 2015 and 2024. Pannebaker used a software that deploys a “linguistic metric of analytical thinking” and scores it with a number. A typical presidential candidate might score between 60 and 70. But Trump scored pitifully low, between 10 and 24.
“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” Pannebaker said. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”
The septuagenarian former president may be experiencing deterioration in the frontal and temporal lobes of his brain, which is a condition the Mayo Clinic refers to as “frontotemporal dementia,” or FTD. Those parts of the brain govern speech, personality, and behavior, and can atrophy for patients suffering from FTD.
“Some people with frontotemporal dementia have changes in their personalities. They become socially inappropriate and may be impulsive or emotionally indifferent,” the Mayo Clinic wrote. “Others lose the ability to properly use language.”
Earlier this year, attorney Jay Kuo interviewed psychologist and psychotherapist Dr. John Gartner for his Substack newsletter. Garnter, who is the founder of the organization Duty to Warn, pointed out multiple distinct ways that he believes show that Trump is indeed suffering from dementia. He noted that Trump exhibits a “shocking decline in verbal fluency” and “often can’t finish a sentence or even a word.”
“Typical of dementia patients, he repeats himself and overuses superlatives and filler words," Gartner said. "Based on his current accelerating rate of decline, it seems very unlikely that Trump could see out a second term without falling off the cliff and becoming totally incapacitated."
Gartner also observed that Trump has “disordered speech” typical of “organically impaired dementia patients.” In 2024 in particular, Gartner said the ex-president has displayed a pattern of using "non-words in place of real words," like "saying 'mishuz' instead of missile, or 'Chrishus' instead of Christmas." Other examples he listed include "'President U-licious S Grant' (For Ulysses S. Grant), 'space-capsicle' (for space capsule), 'combat infantroopen' (for combat infantry), 'sahhven country' (for sovereign country) [and] 'renoversh' (For renovations)."
In the Mayo Clinic’s description of FTD, its website specifically includes a section for “speech and language symptoms.” Many of the symptoms Gartner described are echoed in the Mayo Clinic’s summary of the condition, which they say can include “increasing trouble using and understanding written and spoken language.” Mayo notes that “people with FTD may not be able to find the right word to use in speech,” “have trouble naming things,” and can make “mistakes in sentence building.”
Dr. Gartner acknowledged that others may want to criticize him for diagnosing Trump with dementia without actually having him as a patient. But he asserted that “as a professional community, thousands of us have observed hundreds of hours of Trump’s public behavior" and that they "also have dozens of informant reports.”
"So all the people hyperventilating about 'diagnosing from a distance' should take a breath," Gartner told Kuo. "This is more business as usual than you might think. In real life, we’ve institutionalized tens of thousands of patients on far less data."
Given the similarities between Gartner’s observations and the details on FTD the Mayo Clinic provides on its website, this should prompt even more calls from the media for the 78 year-old former president to release detailed medical records to prove he’s up for the task of being president of the United States for four more years.
“Sanewashing” Trump’s babbling is dishonest and dangerous
During a September speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump’s gobbledegook reached new lows when one of the attendees asked him about his plans to make child care more affordable (the Washington Post included a full verbatim transcript of his 375-word response, which Occupy.com has decided is too lengthy to include here). Trump’s answer was objectively incomprehensible, and journalist Parker Molloy illustrated the media’s culpability in what she called “sanewashing” by putting his “insane” response side-by-side with the New York Times’ summary of his remarks.
“After his speech, Donald Trump was asked how he might address rising child care costs,” the Times’ Michael Gold wrote. “In a jumbled answer, he said he would prioritize legislation on the issue but offered no specifics and insisted that his other economic policies, including tariffs, would ‘take care’ of child care.”
In an essay for the New Republic, Molloy further elaborated on the phenomenon of “sanewashing,” which she defines as “sanitizing Donald Trump’s incoherent ramblings to make them more palatable for the average voter.” She noted one particular speech when Trump proposed putting noted conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a vaccine panel with “top experts” to look into “what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and more.”
However, she found that the Times omitted the former president’s mention of autism entirely (the claim that childhood vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly debunked) when quoting Trump. Molloy suggested that the Times did this in order to put a more serious face on something that would otherwise be laughed at if all of the context was included.
“By removing the mention of autism, which should be a red flag whenever paired with a mention of Kennedy, the Times took an obvious nod to a conspiracy theory and turned it into a normal-sounding policy proposal,” Molloy observed.
Molloy argued that the tendency of media outlets to minimize Trump’s incoherent statements isn’t just poor journalism, but “a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy.”
“By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president,” she continued. “By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality.”
To further underscore her point, Molloy quoted Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who theorized in a June newsletter post that legacy media editors glossed over Trump’s off-script rant about sharks and electric shocks because they felt like they had no choice:
It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts. Therefore, it is our responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize. Which is why, after the electric-shark speech, much of the coverage revolved around the high temperatures in Las Vegas, and other extraneities. The Associated Press headline on a story about the event read this way: “Trump Complains About His Teleprompters at a Scorching Las Vegas Rally.” The New York Times headlined its story thus: “In Las Vegas, Trump Appeals to Local Workers and Avoids Talk of Conviction.” CNN’s headline: “Trump Proposes Eliminating Taxes on Tips at Las Vegas Campaign Rally.”
As journalists, our job differs from stenographers in that we don’t merely write that one person said the sky is red and the other said the sky is blue. It’s crucial to do that work for the readers by going outside, looking at the sky, and plainly writing that the sky is indeed blue. Likewise, if a political candidate — even the presidential nominee of one of the two major parties — frequently deviates from discussing pertinent issues into nonsensical, garbled babbling, it isn’t biased to simply describe their remarks as such.
One common refrain about Trump is that he’s a threat to major institutions. This is typically a reference to the separation of powers, federal regulatory agencies, and the courts. But Trump also presents a unique threat to the press. Some of that threat comes from Trump, who has repeatedly called the media “the enemy of the people.” But Trump has also caused the Fourth Estate to damage itself from within, as publishers and editors are bending and breaking their own rules to sanitize his lies and incomprehensibility. In their attempts to normalize an obviously abnormal candidate, major media outlets risk shirking their responsibility to do the most fundamental job of the free press at their own peril: To tell the truth.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
