Why Is Trump Getting a Pass on His Age and Declining Mental Health?

Plus, DOJ alleges right-wing US media company took millions from Russia, and conservatives all hot and bothered by Harris' accent.

In a recent campaign speech, one of the two presidential nominees babbled incoherently about how “some people don’t eat bacon anymore” because of the “horrible energy” created by wind. “They want wind all over the place. When it doesn't blow, we have a problem,” the candidate added.

The day before, the same candidate lost his train of thought while ranting about his opponent having “destroyed” San Francisco, bizarrely rambling about how much money he had lost and how he had been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln. At no point was there even a hint of a cogent thought.

In the midst of these ever-increasing moments of garbled nonsense, the New York Times published a piece parroting the candidate’s latest excuse for repeatedly “meandering” through his speeches and bouncing from topic to topic with no sense of rhyme or reason.

“In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again,” the Times reported. A week prior, the paper covered a series of the nominee’s unhinged remarks by merely noting the candidate’s “carefully scripted week kept veering off script.”

While it was just six weeks ago that another presumptive nominee was forced out of the race due to concerns about his advanced age and declining mental acuity, the mainstream media no longer seems all that interested in the other party’s 78-year-old candidate sundowning before our very eyes.

As has been the case since he first rode down that golden escalator nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump continues to be graded on a curve by our national media. And it hasn’t been lost on media critics and progressive journalists that now that Joe Biden, who is just three years older than Trump, has dropped out of the race, the press is seemingly looking the other way when it comes to the Republican nominee’s obvious struggles.

“Historians will scratch their heads about 2024, in which 1 candidate was forced to quit the race for being old & having a bad debate while the other candidate said mad, rambling stuff like this & not only stayed in the race but didn’t get pressured to step aside by the media,” Mehdi tweeted last week, referencing Trump’s “bacon” remarks. 

Outsized Coverage

Needless to say, when it was an 81-year-old Biden going head-to-head against Trump, the mainstream media couldn’t stop fixating on the Democrat’s age and cognitive decline. Even before Biden’s disastrous debate performance, five of the top US newspapers had published 10 times as many articles focusing just on Biden’s age as opposed to those solely about Trump’s. 

Of course, after Biden’s feeble showing at the June 27 debate, the floodgates fully opened. Several major papers’ editorial boards, including the New York Times, called on Biden to drop out. By one count, the Times published an eye-popping 192 news and opinion pieces about Biden’s age in the first week after the debate, compared to just 92 stories about Trump in general. 

This included a four-bylined investigation on how Biden’s “lapses appear to have grown more frequent” and how he “is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago.” The authors of that piece, White House reporters Peter Baker, David Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Katie Rogers, have not contributed to any similar articles about Trump’s age-related issues or cognitive decline. (This July 2 piece did briefly note that Trump “has also shown signs of slipping over the years,” adding that “voters have expressed concern about his age as well, but not to the same degree as Mr. Biden’s.”)

The Washington Post followed the Times’ story into Biden’s frailty with a gargantuan report of its own, this one featuring five different reporters. The July 5 article noted how the president’s lapses had become “more common” and that “he seemed slower and more often loses his train of thought.” The piece also included a brief disclaimer about Trump facing “questions about his acuity” while reiterating that voters were more concerned about Biden’s age than the former president’s.

Additionally, the five authors of the Post’s deep-dive – reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Maria Sacchetti, John Hudson, and Dan Diamond – have not collaborated on any comparable pieces about Trump’s age. 

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, published a notorious deep-dive into Biden’s “slipping” performance behind closed doors in early June. Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes, the two authors of the Journal story, have also not written any related articles about Trump’s struggles, though they have written several others about Biden’s age-related issues. Linskey is a White House reporter and Hughes covers Congress for the Journal’s Washington Bureau. 

To be fair, reporters generally have specific beats, and editors also tend to assign stories. For instance, all of the Times reporters on the Biden age story are assigned to the White House beat and specifically cover the Biden administration.

But these newsrooms have yet to give the same deep-dive coverage of Trump's “slipping” as they did on Biden’s decline. The few stories they have published about Trump's age, meanwhile, have largely soft-peddled concerns about the former president’s mental fitness or framed his struggles as going “off-script.” One WaPo column last month, in fact, described Trump as “surprisingly robust” for his age. “There’s no escaping the fact that Trump still seems a good deal younger than Biden. He appears to be nourished by a bottomless wellspring of rage,” columnist Matt Bai noted.

I asked editors of the Times, Post, Axios, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal – major outlets that provided outsized coverage of Biden's age issue – whether they felt they should focus a similar amount of attention on Trump’s cognitive decline, especially since he’s now facing off against a healthier and younger candidate.