The Donald Trump who melted down on the debate stage Tuesday night is not a well man.
He sounded like a lunatic. He expressed his belief in things that simply aren’t true. (Think: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”) He was easily distracted. He repeated himself. He lied egregiously.
Is he competent to be president?
That’s a question journalists should be asking, prominently and relentlessly, until Election Day.
After the June debate that so clearly exposed Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, news coverage questioning his competence to hold office for another term was seemingly never-ending, and for good reason. The end result, of course, was that Biden took himself out of the race and endorsed Kamala Harris.
Now Trump has had a debate that raises serious questions about his competence. And although his party remains solidly behind him, leading Democrats are increasingly willing to raise the issue.
In the wake of the debate, for instance, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries called for Trump to take a cognitive test. “It’s not clear to me that he’s actually mentally fit to do the job.”
You Have Permission Now
Concerns about Trump’s mental state are hardly new. They’ve been raised for years on social media, in opinion columns, and on cable TV. But they’ve generally been avoided by traditional news reporters.
The good news is that this is officially no longer a story that’s too hot for reporters to touch. A permission structure has been established — by the New York Times’s star political reporter Peter Baker no less.
He wrote, one day before the debate, that with Biden dispatched, Trump now “confronts his own test to demonstrate that he has not diminished with age. Whether he passes that test may influence who will be the next occupant of the Oval Office.”
Baker continued: “Mr. Trump’s rambling speeches, sometimes incoherent statements and extreme outbursts have raised questions about his own cognitive health and, according to polls, stimulated doubts among a majority of voters.”
Indeed, even before the debate a slew of bizarre public statements had called renewed attention to the competence question.
Trump was asked last week at the Economic Club of New York how he would make childcare affordable, and responded with word salad about tariffs and the deficit and making America great again.
Earlier this month, speaking to the far-right Mothers for Liberty group, he alleged that kids were going to school and coming back with gender-affirming surgery. It was all completely made up. Nothing remotely like that has ever happened.
There are some signs that journalists may rise to the occasion.
The day after the debate, in an NPR article that went viral (thanks to me) Domenico Montenaro wrote boldly – and accurately – that “The spotlight should now be on Trump’s incoherence and general lack of any serious grasp on policy.”
He continued: “With a more-than-competent performance from Harris Tuesday, Trump’s lies, meandering, conspiracies and often general incoherence was made even more glaring.”
Earlier this month, veteran political commentator Mike Barnicle challenged his media colleagues to come clean with the public about Trump’s mental state.
“Today, we have a damaged, delusional old man who may again get elected to the presidency of the United States,” he said on MSNBC. “How did this happen?”
Barnicle called Trump “deranged sometimes, delusional sometimes” and “out of his mind.” He concluded: “We don’t cover the man for how dangerous he is.”
Not surprisingly, I’m with Barnicle. Indeed, we need reporters to raise serious questions about not just Trump’s mental capacity, but his mental health.
What About His Mental Health?
Trump’s mental health is a very touchy topic for journalists to address, since most mainstream newsrooms prohibit the use of language associated with mental illness unless a person has been diagnosed as mentally ill.
The widely cited Associated Press Stylebook states: “Do not describe an individual as mentally ill unless it is clearly pertinent to a story and the diagnosis is properly sourced. When used, identify the source for the diagnosis. Seek firsthand knowledge; ask how the source knows. Don’t rely on hearsay or speculate on a diagnosis. Specify the time frame for the diagnosis and ask about treatment.”
At the same time, the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” enjoins its members from professionally diagnosing someone they have not personally evaluated.
Nevertheless, some psychiatrists who have studied Trump from afar have long been concerned about his mental state.
Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee edited the 2017 book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”, in which 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health experts raised their concerns about Trump’s mental well-being.
“It should now be obvious that Donald Trump is in a psychotic spiral,” Lee wrote recently.
Justin Frank, a Washington psychoanalyst and author of “Trump on the Couch,” told me in an interview that at this point, reporters should talk to neurologists rather than psychologists.
“I think he’s changing,” said Frank, who has previously identified Trump as a sociopath and a sadist. “I think he’s actually moving into some early states of dementia, so it’s more physiological than psychological,” he said. “The way he mixes up words, mispronounces things, his rambling sentences, he can’t focus. It really is a serious thing and people don’t talk about it.”
Psychiatrist Richard Friedman wrote in the Atlantic on Thursday that Trump “displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.”
One rare occasion when Trump’s mental health made the news was in early August, in Michigan, after the state’s former Democratic Gov. Jim Blanchard asserted in a television interview that Trump suffers from three personality disorders.
“I think most psychiatrists and psychologists would say he’s a malignant narcissist, which means his desire to be loved cannot be satisfied, and he has a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality,” Blanchard said.
“The second thing is he’s a sociopath. And everyone knows that. He knows the difference between right and wrong; it just doesn’t apply to him…
“The third is he’s a pathological liar — launching a campaign based on the Big Lie that he actually won the last election when everyone around him tried to tell him he didn’t. He lies even when it doesn’t matter. He lies even when it doesn’t serve his purposes.”
A Michigan TV station asked the state Republican Party to respond to Blanchard’s comments. Former Republican candidate for governor Tudor Dixon insisted: “If you were a true narcissist, you could never do what Donald Trump does every day. You couldn’t handle the attacks he goes through.”
Stop the Sanewashing
The first thing reporters can do is stop covering up for the crazy.
Critics on social media and elsewhere recently took to using the term “sanewashing”. As newsletter author Parker Molloy explained in The New Republic: “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.”
So step one is to stop the sanewashing. Step two is to directly address Trump’s cognitive decline. Let’s hope our top political journalists are brave and honest enough to go there.