It was the easiest thing in the world to predict: The media's moment of half-hearted contrition for “missing” President Joe Biden’s obvious physical and cognitive decline has given way already to a fixation on President Trump’s health.
The journalists have no choice, you see. They’re humbled now. Their renewed zeal for the truth compels them to correct for the reporting mistakes of the Biden era. Therefore, they must now be unrelentingly suspicious of Trump’s mental and physical health. They learned their lesson!
The mea culpas seem awfully hollow now — more like a thin cover for a public relations reset, clearing the way for media to be far more aggressive about Trump’s age and health than anything we saw during Biden’s term in office.
We don’t have to imagine a double standard. We just lived through four years of major media pretending as if it simply didn’t notice the dementia patient in the Oval Office.
The Daily Beast, which had been an eager and credulous supporter of the Biden White House’s “cheap fakes” nonsense last year, published a May 28 report titled, “Trump Shows Signs of ‘Cognitive Decline,’ Says Speech Expert.” The subhead adds, humorously, “As pressure mounts for an inquiry into Joe Biden’s mental decline, the president faces scrutiny over his health.” This is a neat trick, by the way — publishing an article questioning the president’s mental acuity while also pretending as if you’re not the one doing the “scrutiny.”
Elsewhere, the Associated Press published a story titled, “Trump proclaims himself ‘in good shape,’ but the results of his physical aren’t immediately released.” In a separate report published the same month, the AP warned, “Despite raising persistent questions about Biden’s physical and mental capacity and repeatedly asserting that Biden did not know what he was doing, Trump has routinely kept basic details about his health shrouded in secrecy, in contrast to the traditional transparency on medical issues that presidents of both political parties have shown.”
For context, the AP, days before Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential election, published a report titled, “Biden at 81: Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful.”
In the world of commentary and opinion writing, USA Today published a piece this month titled, “Is Trump in mental decline? He sounds far worse than Biden ever did.” Incredibly, the post is authored by the same pundit who declared in March 2024, “Biden old and frail? Nope. President delivers fiery State of the Union his campaign needed.”
At the Boston Globe, an opinion headline reads, “Trump has lots to say about Biden’s health. His own? Not so much.” Globe columnist Renee Graham argues that the media should "examine more critically the health of the men elected to lead this nation. That certainly includes the physical and cognitive health of the current White House occupant, a Constitution-shredding authoritarian who doesn’t deserve to get by on medical reports that rely more on hyperbole than facts.”
For comparison, Graham wrote last year, in response to questions regarding Biden’s fitness for office, “I can’t speak to Biden’s mental acuity, but we’re witnessing in real time for the first time what it means to have a president in his 80s. How we’re reacting may say more about us than about him. But that’s only part of the frank conversations we need to have about what it means to grow old in a nation that routinely ridicules senior citizens — and not just among our leaders.”
In the world of outright partisan media, the New Republic this month continued a cheeky long-running series meant to highlight Trump’s quirks and foibles, each article of which leads with the question, “Cognitive decline?”
Meanwhile, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan concluded this month that the main takeaway from the press cover-up of Biden’s decline is that the media aren't hard enough on Trump.
“So if the media were going to put their thumb on the scale — as they inevitably do — they ought to have done so in defense of democracy, the rule of law and human decency,” writes Sullivan for a piece titled, “Yes, the media’s Biden coverage was flawed. But its reporting on Trump was far worse.”
Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd added elsewhere a somewhat different note that was still similarly beside-the-point: “To the folks shaming the Biden-enablers, I get the instinct, but the folks on the right doing the victory lap are simultaneously behaving the same way (or worse) when it comes to Trump and his bizarre rants/ statements/ policies that aren’t working/ graft etc. To those folks feeling good about their Biden takes, you comfortable with your Trump enabling? You really think it’ll age well?”
So yes, this is a trend. We are really going to go from four years of news media pretending not to notice the obvious about Biden to four years of the same news media demanding radical transparency and accountability. Next thing you know, they will be demanding weekly blood and urine samples from the current president.
We should not be surprised that the brief period of contrition for turning a blind eye toward Biden has already segued into an opportunity to do to a Republican what they couldn’t bring themselves to do to a Democrat. The signs were all there last year, even before Trump won his re-election bid.
The New York Times reported in October 2024, “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.”
Just months earlier, before Biden imploded on national television during a presidential debate, the New York Times had attempted to brush off photo evidence of Biden’s decline as lacking context and selectively edited with a disinformative story titled, “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts.”
Said PBS, “Trump’s rambling speeches raise questions about mental decline.” From what I can tell, there is no such news report anywhere on PBS's website regarding Biden's decline from during any of the four years of his presidency.
“‘Unintelligible’: Trump’s mental decline on display in final stretch to election,” read a headline on MSNBC. That network had been the site of the famous Joe Scarborough declaration that Biden is “better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically … This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.”
One should not be surprised that we’ve moved on already to applying to Trump a standard that was unthinkable for a Biden obviously suffering mental and physical deterioration. But one must feel some measure of contempt for those who are so obviously unwilling to maintain consistent standards in their news coverage and commentary.
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.
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