Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could be the most consequential president ever elected, such is the crossroads where we find our country. And as Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is raising questions about his cognitive ability while Harris’ readiness for the job is being challenged, the relative fitness of the two raises questions that news outlets have a responsibility to address. With early voting underway, many Americans are tuning in to the race for the first time, and the fact is that Trump has noticeably declined since his last time in the spotlight.
Since his first campaign, Trump has had a tendency to ramble, struggled to answer basic questions without ranting about his grievances and been grossly out of touch with how things like factories work. But those qualities have worsened, his energy has flagged, and he has become noticeably more erratic. It’s not just things like cutting off a town hall after a handful of questions to oddly vibe to his favorite music for half an hour. He’s getting details completely wrong. He’s veering more into conspiracy theories and rumors. He’s obsessed with Hannibal Lecter. He’s pronouncing words strangely. He’s mixing up names and getting basic details wrong.
News media coverage of Trump has been lacking in a way that never really applied to any candidate, Harris included.
All of this might have flown under the radar had he simply left office — there’s not as much attention paid to the day-to-day events of George W. Bush or Barack Obama as when they were president. But ignoring Trump’s decline now simply is not an option when he might be weeks away from once again being president-elect.There’s no question that age and mental acuity are important issues in this election. President Joe Biden exited the race because of those concerns, and Trump himself is currently trying to raise them about Harris. Like he always does, Trump and his allies are trying to flip the critique back at Harris, challenging her fitness for the job, her mental acuity, her judgment.
But in general, news media coverage of Trump has been lacking in a way that never really applied to any candidate, Harris included. For years, news outlets pretended that Trump’s rambling was far more coherent than it really was, no matter what he said. As his thoughts have become increasingly scattered, that practice has been rechristened as sanewashing.
Age and cognitive decline concerns about Trump have never quite gotten major attention since his resurgence to the political scene this year — and a comparison to Biden is telling. We at Media Matters found that from Jan. 15 to June 17 — well before the president dropped out of the race — five of the top U.S. newspapers ran more than 130 articles about Biden’s mental acuity. In the roughly nine months since Jan. 15, those same newspapers have published 94 articles on Trump’s acuity — a rate far below their coverage of Biden’s.Some of these articles thoroughly documented the concerns about Trump’s age. But on this topic, both the quality and the quantity of stories matter. We know what it means to see news outlets flood the zone and make a news story break through to people who don’t think about politics as much as you or I might. And we just aren’t there. Voters deserve to be caught up on what has happened to Trump since he departed the Oval Office. The good news is that it’s not too late. More voters are still tuning in. And they deserve to be caught up on what has happened to Trump since he departed the Oval Office. It’s the height of arrogance to expect all Americans to pay close attention to politicians like Trump (or Harris) the way that political obsessives do. The American people deserve candid and honest appraisals of both candidates. Trump’s decision to cancel multiple mainstream interviews may also give news outlets no choice but to focus on how his age factors into those decisions.None of this is to say what the coverage must be or what the conclusions necessarily are. The American people will ultimately make that judgment call themselves. But given how erratic nearly every single Trump appearance seems to be, the public deserves to have the relevant information presented to them because the gravity of this moment is impossible to ignore.
John C. Whitehouse
John C. Whitehouse has a law degree from the University of Minnesota and is a senior director for Media Matters Action Network. 
