The Media is Questioning the Wrong President's Fitness

Backwards-looking Biden talk is taking the spotlight away from our real and present crisis of leadership—which is just how Trump wants it.

By Shalise Manza Young

As a working journalist for my entire adult life, I’ve done plenty of shouting at the news in recent years—whether at my laptop screen, in my car, or on public sidewalks while walking my Very Good Girl and listening to political podcasts. In the last decade or so, nothing has been more infuriating than witnessing corporate media normalize the completely abnormal.

Minimize the monstrous.

Ignore the immorality.

Whitewash the wicked.

It’s all done in pursuit of profits (thanks, Les Moonves), and no one has benefitted more than that most reliable generator of ratings and clicks: Donald Trump.

Yet despite all that I’ve seen—and plenty that I’ve missed—since the day Trump descended that tacky golden escalator, the last couple of weeks have me feeling like we’ve all been ported into some kind of awful alternate universe.

Why the f*** am I supposed to care now that Joe Biden may have had memory or other health-related issues while he was in the White House?

Why are Democrats being asked on interview shows about Biden and what they did or didn’t know about his mental state and if they worry it will be an issue with voters a year or three years from now?

Because the current President of the United States, you know, the guy who doesn’t read, lies incessantly, and has installed a cadre of vapid cosplaying Fox personalities, puppy killers and toxic creek-swimming nepobabies into some of the most important posts in the country, the president who has never been particularly intelligent…is now an incoherent mess.

As an avid consumer of news, why am I hearing so little about this president’s mental acuity?

In the past four weeks alone Trump:

• Started rambling about non-existent riots in Harlem and lying about the “very, very high Black vote” he got last November when he was asked about his attacks on Harvard University (the most generous assessment of this particular event is that Trump was asked the question by Stephen A. Smith, so seeing a Black man to him meant he had to talk about a Black topics);

• Got angry with ABC reporter Terry Moran and began insulting him when Moran gently pushed back on Trump’s claim that the “MS13” very obviously added to a picture of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckle tattoos wasn’t actually real;

• Went to the United Arab Emirates and defined the “old fashioned” word “grocery” to his hosts, pivoted to his claim that egg prices are down, and brought it all home with, “At the White House, we had our little Easter egg roll and we had hundreds of thousands of eggs purchased. They said, ‘you have to go out and buy plastic eggs.’ That didn’t work out. So we’ve done a real job.” In April he said, “Groceries…a bag with different things in it”;

• During a media event to announce the NFL Draft being held in Washington, D.C. in 2027, he meandered for nearly two minutes about his desire to reopen Alcatraz prison. “Alcatraz is, I would say, the ultimate…It represents something, right now I would say it's a big hulk that's sitting there, rusting and rotting. It's very ahh... it sort of represents something that's both horrible and beautiful, and strong and miserable, weak. It's got a lot of qualities that are interesting,” he said;

• Just days ago he gave a nearly hour-long, meandering address to West Point graduates, at one point making a garbled aside about a real estate developer’s trophy wife and his yachts, and at another spoke of brand new airplanes: “I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sorta wondering. You mean if we shape a wing this way, they don’t see it, but the other way they see it? I’m not so sure.”

If we’re going to talk about a president’s fitness for the job, this is where the focus should be. Trump is not well and he is currently in the Oval Office.

Sadly, the media minimization of shocking events does not begin and end with Trump. When Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic revealed in March that he had been included in a Signal chat with high-ranking administration officials, USA Today ran a story headlined, “‘We’ve all done this’: Trump admin group chat scandal is its most relatable fail,” as if accidentally adding Aunt Helen to the thread when you’re talking about how ridiculous her Easter hat was is totes the same as discussing highly classified details of a military attack with a journalist and multiple others who were not need-to-know.

Since media’s gatekeepers were exclusively white and male until very recently, who gets covered and how has always been skewed. But over the last decade we’ve seen an inexcusable shift away from the thing all aspiring journalists should learn on Day One of their first journalism class: our job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

With Trump’s whining during his first presidential campaign that outlets were being unfair for writing and broadcasting the truth we saw a refusal to call the thing the thing: days after his first inauguration, NPR said it would not use the word “lie” when reporting on Trump’s obvious and numerous untruths. The flimsy justification? The definition of “lie” includes “intention to deceive” and the outlet couldn’t confirm the president’s intentions. Now, with his frequent threats, his outright bullying of reporters that aren’t right-wing lackeys, and with network capitulation including ABC’s $15 million defamation settlement with Trump and CBS execs’ pressuring of revered newsmagazine “60 Minutes” to dilute its coverage, things are getting worse.

Which brings us to today. Authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are on book tour keeping the spotlight on their narrative of Biden, CNN anchors are seemingly required to mention it as much as possible, and widespread discussion of Trump’s clear decline is barely discussed.

Ignoring the issues of the current president is journalistic malpractice because it’s clear the groceries are out of his bag.

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Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.