Mark Jacob on how the press ignores the biggest Trump story
"The president of the United States is clearly mentally unfit for office."
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A major story that probably doesn’t get talked about enough is the reality that the president of the United States is, well, out of his mind.
You see it on display every single day. Whether he’s gloating over the deaths of revered Americans, fabricating conversations with foreign officials and Americans (he did both yesterday) who always seem to have nothing but praise for him, sleeping through on camera events (he did this yesterday too), making mathematically impossible claims, touting made-up accomplishments, or mangling the English language to the point where he just pretends his creations (“mutilization”) are actual words, Trump rarely appears in public without raising grave concerns about his mental state.
This puts the mainstream media in a difficult position. While calling out Trump’s crazed condition has the virtue of being true, it runs the risk of making reporters seem like partisans who are unfair to the president and thus unworthy of access. As a result, White House journalists too often opt for timidity by doing stenography (never mind that Trump is almost always lying), by sanitizing his rantings and making them seem far more coherent than they really are, and/or by suggesting both sides are to blame for the rapidly deteriorating state of the country.
Mark Jacob, author of the Stop the Presses newsletter and a former editor at the Chicago Tribune, has been sounding the alarm for a while about the need for political reporters to be more bold and ambitious in the way they cover Trump.
“People in the media are journalists, not psychologists. They’re used to covering facts, not fantasies,” he wrote last October. “So they don’t know how to react when Donald Trump says or does something that’s mentally deranged. Too often, they try to fit it into a rational frame of reference even though it’s irrational.”
“This sanewashing has been going on for a long time, and I’ve written about it before. But it keeps getting worse, and the mainstream media keep making the same mistakes in their coverage of the King of Crazytown.”
In response to Trump’s bonkers claim last week about how he purportedly “predicted” 9/11, Jacob insisted on Bluesky that the press needs to be “writing about his mental unfitness every day until we get rid of him and save our country.”
A couple days later, we connected with Jacob to go deeper on his critique of the media and what he thinks more responsible coverage of our clearly deranged president would look like.
“There’s never what I would call an umbrella story — one that covers the whole thing and draws broad conclusions, like ‘the president of the United States is psychologically unhinged,’” he told us. “You get these little stories, and then they just kind of roll down the river never to be seen again. People could write sweeping stories that explain how the president of the United States is clearly mentally unfit for office.”
“The best example of the news media deciding that somebody is unfit for office, because of their mental fitness or unfitness, is how they treated Joe Biden in 2024. Joe Biden was old and rational. Right now, Trump is old and irrational, but he’s not getting the same kind of treatment.”
A full transcript of Jacob’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for clarity, follows.
Thor Benson
You’ve been writing about the press failing to call out Trump’s unfitness for office for quite a while, right?
Mark Jacob
I’ve been on that bandwagon for a long time.
The sad thing is that when Trump first ran for president in 2015, I think the news media thought if they just reported what he said, it would be enough to shock the American public away from supporting him. But that didn’t happen. Enough people were excited by his outrageous statements and constant lying that he got elected.
The press decided all of this is normal. They cast aside the idea that this guy’s totally unfit — which he obviously is — and the reality that he’s gotten worse this term. He’s more untethered to reality and closed off to any outside guidance or criticism. He thinks he’s 100 percent right about everything. He’s a total narcissist and egomaniac, and it’s more undeniable every day.
Thor Benson
How specifically do you think major outlets could do better in how they cover Trump?
Mark Jacob
The news media could go much farther than they’ve gone so far in stating how unhinged he is.
To a large extent, coverage of Trump consists of a series of one-off stories. Every time he says something wacky — like that Gavin Newsom is president of the United States, or when he makes some strange claim that he predicted 9/11 — outlets just cover them briefly and move on. They don’t explain why what he says is either untrue or just bizarre.
There’s never what I would call an umbrella story — one that covers the whole thing and draws broad conclusions, like “the president of the United States is psychologically unhinged.” You get these little stories, and then they just kind of roll down the river never to be seen again. People could write sweeping stories that explain how the president of the United States is clearly mentally unfit for office.
If they don’t want to use “unfit,” there are a lot of other words they can use, but clearly they’re not doing a good enough job. You get situations where, like the Rob Reiner thing — that was a one day story. A famous director gets murdered by, allegedly, his son in a horrible tragedy, and Trump decides that it’s the victim’s fault that he was murdered. The reason it goes away is because the news media let it go away.
[Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before Trump posted a similarly grotesque celebration of Robert Mueller’s passing.]
The best example of the news media deciding that somebody is unfit for office, because of their mental fitness or unfitness, is how they treated Joe Biden in 2024. Joe Biden was old and rational. Right now, Trump is old and irrational, but he’s not getting the same kind of treatment.
Thor Benson
It’s almost as if everything Trump says or does happens in a vacuum, and it’s not even just the media who handles him that way. Republicans and Supreme Court justices do it too.
Mark Jacob
“If the president does it, well, then it must be okay.” There’s a lot of that Nixon-style thinking going on.
By making everything just a small daily story instead of telling the broader one about this guy being out of his mind and a danger to all of us, journalists show they’re still worried about coming across as partisan. They don’t want to make themselves part of the story by calling him out. They’re afraid he will direct his deranged behavior toward them. They’d rather write down what he says and assume the American people can figure it out on their own. But obviously some can’t.
There’s also cynicism at play here.
