“TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT, according to Pollsters,” Trump posted after Tuesday’s election blowout, not naming the pollsters.
Yet the media obediently repeated Trump’s words, as if they were news.
They aren’t news. They’re postures. His words and thoughts add nothing to our understanding of anything. Yet the media reproduces them as if they did.
He says whatever happens to be in his brain at the moment. He posts about whatever annoys him at the moment. He constantly changes his mind. His brain wanders in ways that cause many to question whether he — who will be 80 in June, and whose family has a history of dementia — is all there. He lies like most people breathe. He is impetuous and capricious. He has the attention span of a fruit fly.
With Trump in the Oval Office, “news” should no longer be defined as what the president of the United States says or writes or thinks, because the president of the United States is incapable of coherent thought.
One minute America is resuming tests of nuclear weapons, the next moment it’s testing only particular mechanisms involved in nuclear weapons, the next moment he accuses China and Russia of resuming testing and says we’ll do the same — although Russia hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since 1990 and China has not since 1996.
One minute he’s raising tariffs on Canada because an official in a Canadian province aired an ad showing Ronald Reagan to be against tariffs, the next moment he changes his mind. He threatens to hike tariffs on all sorts of countries for all sorts of reasons — to take effect in a month, in two weeks, in 10 days. Or maybe never.
Isn’t it time that the media understood that Trump does not make decisions. Instead, he has moods.
He berates, soothes, scolds, threatens, compliments, and rages.
But moods are not, and should not, be news.
Only actions should be news — not threatened actions, not possible actions, not proposed actions that are mere bubbles on a stream of consciousness — but concrete actions.
Those who report on such actions should let us know exactly who is behind them, because often it’s not Trump.
More likely it’s one of his fanatics — Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, or Pam Bondi — who has ordered specific things to happen. Sailors on certain fishing vessels in the Caribbean, killed. People with brown skin living in southwest Chicago, pulled from their homes in the middle of the night along with their children, tied up, and loaded into vans. An agency of the government stripped of its funding and its public servants fired. Foreign students legally in the U.S. to study have their visas revoked because they’ve said or written things that someone in the regime finds objectionable. Vaccines no longer available.
Trump is responsible, of course, because it’s his regime. Yet we also deserve to know — so we can eventually hold them accountable — the people who are making America into the frightening, bigoted, lawless mess it’s fast becoming.
What is “news” under a president who doesn’t give a damn about anything other than amassing personal power and wealth and getting even with people he believes have wronged him? What’s “news” with a president who lies incessantly? What’s “news” when a president’s mind does not move along rational pathways?
The real news is he’s losing his mind, but the media isn’t reporting on this. The media watched Joe Biden’s mind as if it were watching a giant wounded beast, reporting every hitch and hesitation.
But Trump’s rapid mental decline is somehow uninteresting. The media takes for granted that Trump is maniacal, paranoid, and malignantly narcissistic. So what if he’s becoming ever more so? The norm is abnormal.
Memo to the media: Report on his mental decline but not his moods. Give us details of policies implemented under his name but not his posts. Let us know who is accountable for what the regime is doing and don’t attribute all of it to him.
Give us the news.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.