Transcript: Trump’s Mental Decline Finally Becomes Big Media Story
It reminded me, as I wrote my piece, of the line Joseph Welch delivered to Joseph McCarthy, At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?, which in hindsight is cited as the thing that made the public fixate on McCarthy’s rotten behavior and made him a political pariah. I’m not here to say that Barack Obama has succeeded in finally making Donald Trump the political pariah that he probably should be. But putting it that way, especially at this time now when people are making the most critical decisions they’ll make in this election—for reporters, How do we cover this? What do we say about it?, and then for voters, Which bubble do we fill in on our ballots?—it was a really well-timed and well-executed piece of persuasion. I was gratified to see that other people, other journalists, noticed it and thought that it resonated. It had power to them.
Sargent: Well, there might be a reason for that. To your earlier point here about Obama really just identifying a pivot moment, Trump lying about the disaster response also got the media’s attention in a new way because it’s so manifestly and pathologically inappropriate in someone who wants to lead the country. And importantly, talking about disaster response is the thing that doesn’t trigger journalists’ internal alarm bells about sounding partisan, right? As you’ve written, Trump is overtly campaigning on a promise to abandon blue areas of the country and actively persecute those areas himself, including, to go back to the earlier point, sending in the military to pacify those areas. I just wonder, is the truly malicious nature of all this and the centrality of malice and degradation and venality to how Trump and MAGA do politics finally getting through to the media? It seems like it is to some degree. The Times had a big cover story on just how completely deranged Trump has gotten. It’s not the crusading coverage we’ve seen on Joe Biden’s age, but I feel like some critical mass is getting close to materializing here. Am I being too optimistic?
Beutler: I do think that in the last couple of days maybe, there’s been a change of tenor. And this has happened a few times over the years. Some particularly egregious thing Donald Trump does—January 6 is the obvious example, but there have been others—where the inherent degeneracy of his conduct becomes too hard to deny even to reporters who really feel uncomfortable reporting in a way that makes it clear that the parties are different and they’re led by different kinds of people with different degrees of ethics, right?
