The fact that there’s barely a president is in fact a major national crisis

As Jason Linkins observes, in addition to the absurdly obvious double standard the relative lack of coverage that Trump’s very obvious physical and mental decline is receiving is particularly indefensible given that the power vacuum is being filled by a handful of psychos:

In case you missed it, President Donald Trump fell asleep on television this week. There he was, in the middle of a meeting with the members of his Cabinet, completely set adrift on memory bliss as the pool cameras rolled, locked on his dozy face. Before you worry too much, rest assured that this wasn’t a meeting in which matters of national importance were discussed, but rather one of those now-regular occasions in which the president’s underlings gather to see who can offer him the most flamboyant praise. Still, it is rather worrying that not even these regular sessions of compliment bukkake can sustain the president’s waking interest.

Or, at least it should be worrying? I really hate to play the “age card,” folks, but back in my day (2023 and 2024), I distinctly recall that a president with apparent mental infirmities was nigh unto scandalous. Biden’s famous struggles were a national catastrophe that led many journalists to come a-ridin’ atop their high horses to bother their readers about how they got caught flat-footed by the fact that President Joe Biden, nominated at the age of 77, somehow continued to age. Why had no one warned them? (Probably because the same media, back when this all didn’t seem to matter, ritually executed the one guy at the Democratic debates who did.)

For a press so dedicated to sanewashing the Trump administration’s open sewer of corruption, the kid gloves treatment still seems the order of the day. This week, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire published a lengthy exegesis of the “President Trump is increasingly isolated” variety, titled “The Bubble-Wrapped President.” In the piece, Lemire reports that Trump has “dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term.” He is described therein as “distracted,” “out of touch,” focused on matters not “high on voters’ minds,” and showing “little willingness to acknowledge” problems gripping the country.   

The piece treats this mostly as some kind of inscrutable mystery, a tale told by the thinking-face emoji. The real story is moving between the lines: The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli. The president moldering in a narcoleptic haze as Marco Rubio yammers away at his side is the same guy who doesn’t seem to remember why he pardoned former Honduran president and celebrated drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, or what part of his body was recently subjected to an MRI. 

There is plenty of room for the discourse to shift, however—and some evidence that it might. The New York Times treats the matter with somewhat less puzzlement than The Atlantic, noting Trump’s advanced age and planting a few red flags about his health; its piece garnered an outraged Truth Social post from Trump after publication. In one of the few articles to actually take on the matter of Trump’s obvious infirmity frontally, The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt seems exasperated that a president who has obvious trouble “completing a thought” has “largely been saved the same examination” so regularly foisted on Biden.

If The Atlantic limits that examination to a single aside, in which Trump’s lack of acuity is likened to “the same low energy move for which [he] used to mock Joe Biden,” the latter half of the piece does at least present a compelling reason why more attention to a fully noped-out chief executive might be a matter of some alarm: The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by “enablers” rather than people who might “[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses.” Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear—and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter.

It was obviously a mistake for Biden to run again, but even as he was losing energy his administration was staffed by competent people who didn’t decide to, say, start issuing “no quarter” orders when attacking random boats heading to France. This is a much more serious problem, and with a few exceptions the coverage is not reflecting that.

If you’re in the mood for some black comedy, the New York Times’s erstwhile presidential age correspondent has failed upward to Vox and posits that Marco Rubio’s ultra-hawkish foreign policy and “MAGA doctrine” are in conflict when they’re one and the same, by definition. (Why do all these warmongers keep ending up in my administration?) But hey when you spent 2024 palpably rooting for Trump because he was both the Youthful Energy candidate and the Peace candidate, facts and logic aren’t going to start figuring into your thinking now.