Why does the media ignore Trump’s madness?
His Truth Social posts show he's better suited in a mental institution than at a negotiating table.
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Donald Trump frequently demonstrates a level of malignancy that still manages to shock. He doesn’t try to hide it, but unfortunately, the mainstream media covers his disordered thinking as a colorful “quirk” — Trump being Trump — rather than a serious, escalating threat to the nation.
This past weekend, Trump’s social media feed was a wellspring of lunacy. He posted more than 50 times on Saturday alone, hurling personal attacks at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rosie O’Donnell — one of whom was never actually president. He shared an absurd AI-generated image of himself as a New York Knicks player dunking on Gov. Kathy Hochul. He boasted about defeating “disloyal” Republicans in their primaries. He continued picking fights with the Pope. He attacked the judge who ruled that he couldn’t illegally deface the Kennedy Center with his name.
After even half of Milli Vanilli refused to perform at his America 250 event, Trump posted this gaping wound of narcissistic injury:
I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President.
Until an appearance before cameras yesterday in which he seemed extremely tired and nearly comatose, Trump hadn’t been seen in public since May 27 — the day after his most recent trip to Walter Reed — so while these posts were technically “proof of life,” they were hardly a reassuring statement of mental stability.
Yet Trump’s unhinged posts last weekend weren’t the stuff of front-page coverage at the New York Times or Washington Post, even though there’s a direct line between them and the administration’s ongoing disaster in Iran. After all, it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to determine, based on the president’s online crashout, that the Trump administration is no closer to a resolution of the war.
White House officials keep insisting that they’re just a “couple days” away from a deal with Iran. It’s almost become like the running joke in the 1986 Tom Hanks film, “The Money Pit,” where corrupt contractors keep telling Hanks’ character that repairs will just take another “two weeks.”
Nonetheless, mainstream media outlets dutifully report the administration’s claims of an impending deal. Their continued credulity is especially unwarranted considering that the person ultimately in charge of any resolution, the actual commander in chief, is the same man who gloated over the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” with an AI-generated post depicting Trump hurling Colbert into a dumpster and dancing gleefully.
The rate of Trump’s manic posting on social media accelerated in May, just as Iran became more of a no-spin scenario for the president. Unable to dig himself out of his deepening hole, he spent most of Memorial Day weekend mentally unraveling online. He resumed his unprecedented threats against a US ally with two Truth Social posts that depicted his massive face looming sinisterly over Greenland. He posted an AI image of Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in a sheep costume with vampire teeth, witing, “A Dumocrat! Don’t allow this lying sleazebag on FoxNews!”
Trump posted an image of a fighter jet seemingly about to drop a bomb with the words “Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter” written on its side. He shared an image of himself holding a shotgun over a slain rhinoceros with the menacing caption “NO RINOS” (a term for “Republicans In Name Only” that Trump commonly uses to describe any Republican who crosses him).
Anyone who saw these posts could reasonably conclude Trump is better suited in a mental institution and not at a negotiating table.
The breakdowns aren’t a ‘distraction’
Legacy media might wish to avoid taking the apparently bold moral position that the US president shouldn’t behave like a crazy person, but in the process they’re ignoring the bombshell story that the sitting one is deranged.
The social media screeds and public meltdowns don’t simply demonstrate Trump’s low character. They show a president who’s mentally and morally incapable of effective leadership. In a sane world, every manic posting spree would generate wall-to-wall coverage demanding his resignation or forced removal from office.
Yet, instead, the press seemingly covers the president as though he’s two distinct personas — the petty, bigoted shitposter and an otherwise normal if slightly unconventional commander in chief. But the sad reality is that the unstable shitposter is the only Trump, and unfortunately, that’s the one who’s in the room where the “dealmaking” happens.
If Nixon’s irrational paranoia destroyed his presidency, Trump’s presidency, especially during his second term when he’s surrounded himself with nothing but sycophants, exists only to further his personal grievances and vendettas. Nothing matters more to him than callow displays of dominance.
Even if we buy the media-enabled GOP narrative that Trump is merely a fun-having jerk who enjoys “trolling” his opponents, it clearly gets in the way of business. Trump’s gross behavior isn’t a wily strategy. It comes off like a psychotic compulsion.
Consider that Trump spent the first year and a half of his second reign of terror alienating America’s allies. He launched vindictive, petty global trade wars. He threatened both Greenland and Canada with annexation — churlishly calling Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “future Governor of Canada.” (Last week, Trump shared an article about Canada’s economic challenges with the words “51st State!”) Trump has minimized the contribution our NATO allies have made to the global order. He gutted critical foreign aid and abandoned US soft power.
Other leaders of the actual free world have expressed doubt that America is still on their side. To the extent you could call isolating America from the free world an actual strategy, it all blew up in Trump’s face after he started a war of choice in Iran and desperately needed our allies’ support.
It’s not just that Trump’s incompetent — because he very much is — he’s fundamentally incapable of restraining his worst impulses. So he replaces complex diplomacy with thuggish rants on social media. When US allies weren’t rushing to bail him out of his self-inflicted Iran disaster, Trump whined in March: "Because of the fact we have had such Military Success, we no longer 'need,' or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of US, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!"
That last all-caps sentence in particular reads like a clarion cry for help.
Peter Baker at the New York Times wrote in April that Trump’s “erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.” But what’s “crazy” is that the Times would even frame this as a debate.
Trump is not “crazy like a fox,” unless the specific fox is also mentally unwell. Both the economy and Trump’s approval rating are in free fall. There is obviously no method to his unchecked madness. Last week, Trump casually threatened the Middle East nation of Oman, one of America’s staunchest allies in the region, if it didn’t bend to his shambolic will: “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.”
It’s frightening how much the public Trump sounds like his most bonkers social media rant.
After noting that Trump obsessively posts “disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements” that threaten war crimes against Iran or personally attack the Pope as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Baker made this bizarre comparison: “While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated — and with such profound consequences.”
This is maddening, as Trump and Biden simply don’t belong in the same conversation about a president’s deteriorating mental state. As amply covered in the press, Biden was in fact old and thus experienced age-related decline, but the worst-case scenario with him at the wheel was not a potential nuclear holocaust. Even when Special Counsel Robert Hur gratuitously described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur conceded that Biden otherwise presented as “sympathetic“ and “well-meaning.“
Biden on his worst day was emotionally stable. Trump, on every day, is outright sadistic, and his resulting behavior is increasingly reckless. Biden’s diplomacy united allies against Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. He successfully negotiated bipartisan bills in Congress. But Trump has blown up longstanding alliances while purging dissenters and weaponizing government against his foes.
During Trump’s first term, Republicans would often say they wished he would post on social media less and govern more. This promoted the myth that Trump was actually competent, the dysfunction limited to his smartphone. Now, Republicans don’t even bother. They accept Trump’s madness, but that’s no reason we should ever ignore it.
Trump’s increasingly obvious unfiltered mental instability is the true original sin that should headline every news article until he’s finally out of office.
That’s it for today
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Beyond the lunacy of Trump’s (too many) posts, the real giveaway is when he speaks—mostly monosyllables, things repeated thrice, practically childish, a series of unfinished sentences. This is the voice of an eight year old bully.
We were already in a sad state with social media, algorithms, and billionaires profiting on lies, conspiracy theories, and hate speech. As our democracy is shredded before our eyes and an obviously incompetent president abuses his authority, the corporate media has succumbed, just like the Republican congress, academia, and the Supreme Court. It’s up to We The People to exert everything we’ve got to bring this madness to an end.