According to a jaw-dropping New York Times report, during the 2024 campaign, Elon Musk “told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use.” He allegedly took a smorgasbord of drugs, including ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, while toting around his “daily medication box… [that] held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall”. While the Times could not confirm Musk’s drug abuse continued into his stint at the White House, we could all see that Musk “exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.” In layman’s terms, the guy has acted nuts and continued to do so in full sight of Donald Trump, whose judgment when it comes to associates has long been abominable.
In a responsible media environment, the act of delegating enormous power and access to the most sensitive government and individual data to someone so manifestly unwell would set off demands for investigation—if not impeachment—of the president who had so cavalierly entrusted him with the federal government’s operations. And yet, the corporate and billionaire media continue to obsess over a former president who ran a successful, competent administration with entirely sober and qualified advisers.
“The ever-so-apt term ‘sanewashing’ was born to describe what was going on, and the media’s role. Talk about a cover-up,” wrote Margaret Sullivan regarding 2024 campaign coverage. “Trump’s rallies were exercises in lunacy, as he spun tales about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, rambling for hours.” Sullivan added that “coverage seldom came close to getting across the reality. Instead, we’d hear descriptions about his ‘freewheeling’ style or ‘brash’ approach.”
As lax as the Trump coverage was, consider how much more egregious has been the sanewashing now that he is exercising power in ways that reveal his broken psyche. Even worse, Trump’s entire cohort—whose lunacy is on display every day—get the same treatment.
While Musk was the most unstable, wacked-out member of the Trump team, we should consider the full array of misfits, cranks, neo-Nazi sympathizers, demagogues, anti-constitutionalists, and habitual liars who populate the Trump team. In a single administration, there have never been so many intellectually shortchanged figures, ethically compromised lawyers, and emotionally unhinged conspiratorialists (from Kash Patel to Ed Martin to Paul Ingrassia to Emil Bove to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to Pete Hegseth to Stephen Miller). Given all that, the coverage of the Trump crew has been bizarrely inexact and feeble. Continuing to treat them as simply “conservatives” or “right-wing” figures rather than unwell and part of a cabal of nuttery serves to normalize a dangerous, bizarre regime, unlike anything we have seen in modern American history.
It is no coincidence that Trump chose them. “Authoritarianism is the conversion of rule of law into rule by the lawless. He needs the people with those skill sets on his side,” historian Ruth Ben Ghiat explained. If a narcissistic, amoral, unhinged, and vengeful criminal (convicted of 34 counts) wants his wishes executed, he is going to surround himself with people as bonkers as he is. It’s the other side of the coin of Trump’s disdain for experts—those who grasp and adhere to evidence and would object to his moral and intellectual deconstructionism. Put differently, Trump insists that those around him be as demented (or willing to pretend they are) as their boss.
Without fully exploring the mental, moral, and emotional condition of Trump and his coterie of kooks, corporate and billionaire media outlets treat each new revelation (e.g., a fraudulent MAHA report, the State Department’s embrace of the Nazified term “remigration,” attacks on judges, threats to prosecute political enemies, defiance of court orders, appointment of unfit officials, etc.) as a discrete episode rather than part of a pattern of crackpottery symptomatic of late-stage authoritarianism. The failure to convey the enormity of the problem has serious ramifications.
First, Republican senators who have rubber-stamped many of these figures are not held accountable for abdication of their constitutional responsibility to provide advice and consent and (along with the House) to perform oversight. If their manifestness was a given, the fecklessness of the Republican House and Senate members in confirming them would be more scandalous. The deference lawmakers normally extend to presidents might evaporate, and Republicans might face demands to examine every nominee with a fine-toothed comb. (When someone like Ed Martin’s record finally broke through the media noise, Republicans eventually relented and refused to confirm him. Imagine if they felt the same heat about every nominee.)
Second, refusal to acknowledge Trump and his minions’ irrationality leads to constant rationalization of unhinged behavior as part of some grandiose, ingenious strategy. Ed Kilgore wrote last month: “This rationalization of the 47th president’s worst impulses is especially dangerous since it reinforces his own belief that he is never wrong.” Kilgore argued that if Trump “is encouraged to behave more erratically than ever, he will continue to reward destructive nihilism in his subordinates, and we’ll all go a bit mad just trying to keep up.”
The corporate and billionaire-owned media serve up jokey TACO memes, but deliver little comprehensive analysis of Trump’s underlying instability, contradictory impulses, and reversals on policy matters ranging from tariffs to Ukraine, all aided and abetted by hand-picked stooges.
In sum, pretending this crew is stable only puts our democracy and national security at greater risk. It may be too scary to contemplate (and too daring for captive, timorous corporate media to recognize) that Trump is nuts and that his advisers prove that the fish rots from the head. But the evidence is all around us. The Trump regime’s endemic nuttery should provoke fearless, aggressive reporting to convey the enormity of the problem. It should lend urgency to the task of consolidating a forceful, uncompromising coalition of sane, decent, and normal Americans to combat MAGA’s reign of crazy.
Telling like it is… the first step back toward sanity. Keep up the good work!
Exactly!! They are the very definition of kakistocracy.