'All the President’s Mental Lapses'
'Democracy dies in deception.'

<https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/all-the-presidents-mental-lapses/>

'There were two presidential campaigns in 2024: one between Donald Trump
and Joe Biden, and then one between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The
first began to end, and the second began to take shape, during the
Trump-Biden debate held on June 27. The story of that debate was
President Biden, who looked and sounded dreadful. His performance
confirmed Democrats’ worst fears and Republicans’ best argument: Joe
Biden, born 11 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was too old and
cognitively diminished to discharge his presidential duties now, much
less over the course of a second term that would last beyond his 86th
birthday.

The debate triggered a panic attack among Democratic politicians and
supportive journalists. The next day, The New York Times ran an
editorial beseeching Biden to withdraw from the race. The New Yorker,
another publication that had supported Biden’s presidency, published a
similar plea the following day. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor,
wrote that Biden “went to pieces on CNN, in front of tens of millions of
his compatriots,” who witnessed “the spectacle of a man of eighty-one,
struggling terribly with memory, syntax, nerves, and fragility, his
visage slack with the dawning sense that his mind was letting him down.”

By the time Jill Biden helped her husband down the steps at the
conclusion of the 90-minute debate, Biden’s presidential campaign was in
crisis. It took 24 days of public and behind-the-scenes pressure before
he abandoned his quest for a second term. There is much yet to be
learned about how a proud, stubborn man was ultimately induced to give
up the office he began seeking in the 1980s. The story may never be
known in full. But the simplest explanation is that Biden finally
accepted that continuing to run for a second term would make Donald
Trump’s return to the White House likely, perhaps even certain. Since
the beginning of his campaign in 2019, Biden had spent five years
calling Trump a grave threat to the American experiment. Yet if he
refused to stand down, Biden would be remembered as the vain, heedless
politician who had instead guaranteed that Trumpism would revive,
stronger this time than before Biden took office in 2021. In an Oval
Office address on July 24, three days after he abandoned his re-election
campaign by posting a message on social media, Biden came as close as he
ever has to explaining his decision: “I believe my record as president,
my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a
second term, but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our
democracy, and that includes personal ambition.”

Cover-Up and Scandal

The first reactions to Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris
indicate that if Biden’s motive in ending his candidacy was to avoid
blame for elevating Trump, he might as well have kept his own name on
the ballot all the way through November. The case against Biden is that
he stayed in the race too long and left it too late. Had he never run at
all, either Harris would have conducted a better campaign than the one
she began 107 days before the election, or the Democrats would have had
truly contested primaries and selected a better nominee.

Some of the criticism is scalding. “He shouldn’t have run,” an aide to
the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Politico. “He
and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner was equally caustic. The “blame for
Trump’s victory overwhelmingly lies with one person: Joe Biden,” he
wrote. “Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing to behold: well before
2024, he was quite simply too old to ask people, in good faith, to keep
him in office through 2028.” The Washington Post editorial page was no
less harsh. “It’s now acknowledged almost universally that Mr. Biden
should not have sought a second term,” the paper wrote on November 8,
“but the Democratic establishment denied the obvious and propped him up
politically, even as evidence of his decline mounted.”

These severe assessments are true, but not the whole truth. It wasn’t
just members of the Democratic establishment who denied the obvious
facts about Joe Biden’s diminished capacities and ignored or dissembled
about the mounting evidence of his decline. It was also the “mainstream”
or “legacy” media. Biden’s disastrous performance at the June debate
caused a shock, and also a meta-shock. It was astonishing that he was in
such bad shape, and then it was astonishing that supposedly
knowledgeable, reliable journalists, in the middle of an octogenarian’s
fourth year in the presidency, either were stunned or acted stunned at
what they saw of Biden that night.

Interviewed on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in October, veteran journalist
Mark Halperin called the “cover-up” of Biden’s decline the worst scandal
in the history of American journalism. Americans naïvely assumed,
Halperin said, that the days were over when journalists would, rather
than exert themselves to uncover it, be complicit in concealing
information the public deserved to know. The press’s coziness with those
in power made it possible to keep secrets about Woodrow Wilson’s and
Franklin Roosevelt’s deteriorating health, or John Kennedy’s reckless
philandering. Such corruption was supposed to be a disgrace to avoid,
not a model for today’s journalists to emulate. Reporters failed in
their professional obligations, according to Halperin, due to “some
affection for Biden, the bullying of his staff, but primarily because of
the desire to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t win.” Journalists covering
the White House were, he said, fully aware that Biden’s “acuity decline
was substantial.” But to say so in print, on the air, or even in their
newsrooms was “impermissible.”

His and Hur’s

In the “hippy dippy weatherman” bit that launched his comedy career,
George Carlin said, “I imagine some of you were a little surprised at
the weather over the weekend. Especially if you watched my show Friday
night.” In the same way, one of the reasons the “Democratic
establishment denied the obvious” regarding Joe Biden’s decline, to
quote the Post’s editorial again, was that it would not have been
obvious to anyone whose sole source of political information was The
Washington Post.

In its editorial after the election, for example, the Post spoke warmly
of special counsel Robert Hur and the report he issued in February 2024,
which recommended that the Justice Department not pursue a criminal case
against Biden for mishandling classified material after he finished his
term as vice president in 2017 (and became a private citizen for the
first time since 1972). Hur’s report took the position that the statute
against the improper use of classified documents required prosecutors to
prove beyond a reasonable doubt a defendant’s willful intent: mistakenly
packing a classified file in a box of personal memorabilia was not a
crime. For that reason, Hur felt it necessary to state in his report
that, based on five hours of interviews with the president, a jury was
likely to view Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a
poor memory.” Any prosecution of such a defendant would be futile,
pointless, and therefore even cruel.

Hur’s brief comments about Biden’s age and memory elicited Democrats’
accusations that the special counsel had made a political attack on
Biden for reasons unconnected to his duties in the case. According to
the Post’s November 8 editorial, however, “Hur has been repeatedly
vindicated during the intervening nine months. The interview
transcripts, when they came out, bolstered his conclusions. If anything,
the truth was worse than what Mr. Hur described.”

But that wasn’t how the paper reacted when the report was issued. A
February 9 editorial titled “The Special Counsel Says the President Is
Old. Nothing New About That” said that “critics are right that Mr. Hur
did not need to lay it on quite so thick,” especially since “Republicans
[are] milking the moment for all it is worth.” After all, “there is
nothing new about Mr. Biden’s memory lapses, malapropisms, and rambling,
sometimes embroidered anecdotes. This has been an aspect of his
political persona since he was a much younger man. And it has plainly
not improved with age.”

And did the transcripts of prosecutors’ interviews with Biden, released
in March, really bolster Hur’s conclusions, as the Post said in
November? Was the truth even worse than what Hur described? Not
according to the paper’s news pages at the time. A March 12 story titled
“Full Transcript of Biden’s Special Counsel Interview Paints Nuanced
Portrait” stated, “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded
as Hur has made him out to be.” According to the November 8 editorial,
Biden displayed “frequent forgetfulness and hazy answers” when
interviewed by Hur. The assessment offered in the earlier news article,
however, was that the interview was characterized by digressions and
banter. “Biden frequently joked with prosecutors in a setting that
seemed more chummy than antagonistic.”

Similarly, the November 8 editorial criticizes Vice President Harris for
disputing the Hur report when it came out. “The way that the president’s
demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong,” she
said at the time. But at least Harris’s motives were clear, as are the
constraints on what a politician can or cannot say.

These extenuations do not apply to newspaper columnists. Though their
political disposition is seldom kept secret, they are still regarded as
journalists, not publicists for a party or candidate. Nevertheless, on
February 9 the Post’s Ruth Marcus denounced Hur’s remarks about Biden’s
memory and demeanor as “not merely gratuitous” but “an egregious
transgression of prosecutorial boundaries.” That is, Hur had no business
offering his opinion of Biden’s memory, an opinion that meshed perfectly
with GOP criticism of a Democratic rival. And, in any case, Hur’s
conclusions were factually dubious. “This portrayal of Biden as a
doddering old man is inconsistent with what I hear from those who have
frequent interactions with him,” Marcus wrote.

She amplified this claim in a March column, which asserted that Hur had,
in his report, “mischaracterized and overstated Biden’s alleged memory
lapses. He consistently adopted an interpretation that is as
uncharitable and damaging to Biden as possible.” Having read the Hur
interview transcript “from the perspective of someone who’s watched
Biden—and watched him stumble over his words—for decades now,” Marcus
detected nothing worse than “Biden being Biden—working through out loud
what the rest of us do silently.”

Post columnist Jennifer Rubin was, if anything, even angrier about the
special counsel report. She wrote on February 12 that it was “Hur’s
gratuitous smear about Biden’s age and memory—most egregiously, his
far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son
Beau’s death—that transformed a snide report into a political screed.”
That Rubin’s conviction about Biden’s fitness for office was not shaken
by the Hur report should not surprise us, since it was also not shaken
by the president’s June 27 debate against Trump. Writing the next day,
Rubin allowed that Biden “looked and sounded his age.” Nonetheless, the
president “had his facts in a row.” He “recited his economic
accomplishments, reiterated figures on the debt, pounced on Trump for
getting Roe v. Wade overturned (and made the case Trump would sign a
nationwide ban on abortion), repeated the details of his border plan and
called out Trump for ‘lies’ on veterans and immigration.” All in all,
Biden “did a workmanlike job, gaining ground as the 90 minutes ticked
by.”

Older and Wiser

Marcus and Rubin were not alone in rebuking those who asserted that
Biden was in decline. As best as I can tell, the Post’s Fact Checker
column, written by Glenn Kessler, has devoted only two pieces since
Biden took office in January 2021 to questions about his cognitive
state. The first, appearing in September 2021, awarded “Four
Pinocchios”—Kessler’s severest rating, given to the most dishonest
assertions—to the Republican National Committee and “right-leaning news
organizations” for pushing a story about Biden staffers jumping in to
prevent their boss from answering press questions. “Once again,” Kessler
pronounced, “the RNC has made a mountain out of a molehill. The
right-wing media, in an eagerness to keep alive a narrative of an
elderly president controlled by his staff, quickly followed suit.”

The more recent Fact Checker column, published on June 14, 2024,
amounted to an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin examination of different
versions of a film clip that showed Biden standing in an open field with
other Group of Seven leaders, watching military skydivers. Kessler
analyzes camera angles and edits to insist that Biden was merely
conversing with one of the parachutists after his jump, rather than
wandering away from the rest of the summit-meeting principals. It is not
certain how Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni viewed the situation,
since every version of the film clip showed her stepping away from the
other leaders to gently take President Biden’s arm and turn him around
to watch what the entire group was watching. Kessler discerns nothing
ambiguous, however. He, again, awards RNC and conservative news outlets
Four Pinocchios for an “especially pernicious” use of “manipulated
video…intended to create a false narrative that doesn’t reflect the
event as it occurred.”

Kessler’s interpretation aligned with that of a June 12 Post news
article that took exception to the “selectively edited clips of [Biden]
circulated online to paint the picture of a physically and mentally
challenged commander in chief.” In any case, a Post article about mental
health in general labored to put talk of Biden’s decline in a reassuring
context. Published on February 10, at the height of the controversy over
the Hur report, it offered the view of “memory experts” that “memory
lapses at any age are surprisingly normal and, for most people, aren’t a
signal of mental decline.” Indeed, one said, “An older brain is a wiser
brain. It has experience to draw on.”

Before and After

The Post’s November 8 editorial did not mince words about how bad the
Democratic Party and Biden Administration looked in light of his shaky
public performances. “Democrats tried to make fidelity to science, facts
and truth their distinguishing characteristic as a party. The White
House’s aggressive coverup of Mr. Biden’s decline undermined that
claim.” In particular,

Biden’s allies concocted terms such as “cheap fakes” to dismiss
embarrassing video clips in which Mr. Biden appeared dazed, confused,
tired and inaudible. [The title for Kessler’s column about the 2024
Group of Seven meeting was “‘Cheapfake’ Biden Videos Enrapture
Right-Wing Media, But Deeply Mislead.”] Allies of the president
frequently labeled content they didn’t approve of as “disinformation,”
cheapening the term. When a few journalists reported accurately on Mr.
Biden’s decline, the White House fed critical talking points about their
stories to others in the media.

A link in the online version of the editorial revealed that the Post
editorialists’ idea of a good example of “journalists who reported
accurately” on Biden’s decline is a Wall Street Journal story, “Behind
Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping,” published on June 4, three
weeks before the president debated Donald Trump.

It’s curious that the Post editorial page would direct readers and
praise to a rival newspaper. There was, after all, a Washington Post
story that reported accurately on Biden’s decline. But it appeared on
July 5, eight days after the fateful debate. “Biden’s Aging is Seen as
Accelerating; Lapses Described as More Common,” the headline announced.
Five reporters spoke to 21 sources, most of them off the record, to
produce the 3,000-word article.

The lede states that Biden “has displayed signs of accelerated aging in
recent months.” He “moves more slowly, speaks more softly and has
moments when he loses his train of thought more often than even just a
year ago.” Further on, we learn that Biden “has exhibited occasional
lapses in which he has appeared to briefly freeze up or suddenly veer
off topic, instances some said they easily dismissed before the debate
but have now caused them to question his ability to do the job for
another four years.” We also learn that at the 2024 Group of Seven
meeting, “several European leaders came away stunned at how much older
the president seemed from when they had last interacted with him only a
year or, in some cases, mere months earlier.” (This was the same meeting
where videos led to claims that Biden showed signs of being non compos
mentis, an interpretation that Post stories had attacked.) Furthermore,
“Biden’s aides…adjust his schedule to avoid overly taxing him.” As a
result, “most high-priority meetings and key events are scheduled
midday, when aides believe Biden is at his best.”

Journalism and Politics

Was there a journalistic reason why the subject of a sitting president’s
ability to discharge his duties had been treated one way by the Post for
three-and-a-half years before the Trump-Biden debate, and in a
completely different way a week after that debate? It’s probable that
more sources were willing to talk with some candor about Biden’s mental
acuity after June 27 than before. The Biden White House was regarded as
one with fewer “leaks” than any in living memory. (Though the reason it
was buttoned up so tight became clear during the debate.)

But the simplest explanation for the Post’s conduct is that there was a
compelling political reason to dispute, deny, and disregard Biden’s
reduced mental and verbal capacities before the debate, and to attack
the motives and honesty of those who raised the question. These
political considerations were overturned by Biden’s ghastly performance,
making it necessary to report on this topic aggressively. Before the
debate, ensuring Donald Trump’s defeat in November required saying as
little as possible about Biden’s decline, and making every effort to
contend that he was still up to the job—and would be for an additional
four years. Biden was in fact running already, his approval ratings were
low but his vice president’s were even lower. Given that there was no
evident way to deny Biden the 2024 Democratic nomination or find an
alternative to him who was clearly more promising, criticism of Biden
could only benefit Trump.

The debate, however, nullified these political calculations. It now
seemed highly likely that insisting Biden was still fit for duty would
wind up helping rather than hurting Trump. Pre-debate, maintaining that
Biden was up to the job had been the best bet for preventing Trump’s
return to the White House. Post-debate, Biden’s continuing candidacy,
which had appeared to be the Democratic Party’s least bad option, turned
into its most bad option. (Following Trump’s victory in November, Jon
Favreau, a speechwriter in the Obama White House, said on his “Pod Save
America” podcast that internal Biden campaign polling, reflecting the
impact of the June debate, showed Trump on track to win 400 electoral
votes if Biden remained the Democratic nominee.) With only 53 days
between the June 27 debate and the opening of the Democratic convention
in Chicago, the mission of driving Biden out of the race in favor of a
candidate who could speak audibly and in complete sentences was
daunting, but a risk that had to be run. The Post was prepared to do its
part by publishing a long, detailed article about Biden’s decline. A
story that had been impermissible, in Mark Halperin’s phrase, for more
than three years became imperative within just one week.

A collateral consideration was the need to restore the newspaper’s
credibility. It’s bad enough to have a hack like Jennifer Rubin be a
voice at the Post, insisting that despite what 50 million people thought
they saw on June 27, what they really saw was Joe Biden delivering a
successful performance that made clear he was a capable president, and
would remain so through January 2029. But to make Rubin the voice of the
paper, to have all its news and editorial judgments align slavishly with
Joe Biden or the Democratic Party’s interests, would make the Post a
laughingstock.

And, coming full circle, doing so would also erase the Post’s political
value to Democrats or liberal causes in general. If the Post’s contents
are indistinguishable from Democratic National Committee or Center for
American Progress press releases, that is, they won’t get any more
traction, or be taken any more seriously, than press releases. Democrats
don’t want The Washington Post to have journalistic integrity, to follow
the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of who ends up looking bad.
They want the opposite, for the Post to be a team player they can count
on.

It’s just that for this team membership to be of benefit to the
Democratic Party, and progressives’ efforts more broadly, The Washington
Post must appear to have journalistic integrity. To be, instead,
obviously biased in what it writes, covers, and ignores, defeats the
purpose. So, the Post must walk a fine line: to support Democratic
politicians and liberal causes reliably, but not blatantly. The swift
transformation of the Post’s take on Joe Biden’s ability to serve as
president came in recognition that the coverage before the June 27
debate had left the paper exposed and hard to take seriously, thereby
negating its value in the fight against the GOP, conservatism, and,
above all, Donald Trump.

Sharp and Confused

The Washington Post was not alone in concealing the news about Joe
Biden’s decline. It may have been fairly typical, rather than one of the
worst offenders. After all, there’s no point in refusing to cover a
story if your competitors are all over it. As in an economic boycott of
a particular company, a journalistic boycott of a particular story is
effective only if it is widely observed.

Which the boycott of the Biden story was. Media critic Drew Holden
gathered some of the best examples in his Substack newsletter. In 2023,
after Biden had announced his run for reelection, Time magazine ran a
story lamenting “The Weaponization of Biden’s Age.” It appeared three
months after a New York Times story, “Inside the Complicated Reality of
Being America’s Oldest President,” which reported that “people who deal
with [Biden] regularly, including some of his adversaries, say he
remains sharp and commanding in private meetings.” Indeed, “[s]ome who
accompany him overseas express astonishment at his ability to keep up.”
On July 3, 2024, six days after the debate against Trump, Associated
Press couldn’t pick a horse, so tried to ride them both: “Biden at 81:
Often Sharp and Focused But Sometimes Confused and Forgetful.”

But that outlet was one of the last to realize which horse was going to
win. Stories like The Washington Post’s about Biden’s decline began to
appear regularly in July. A long piece in Politico stated that “inside
the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long
before his meltdown in last week’s debate.” Biden’s reactions to
discouraging material from subordinates had become so volatile, one
official told Politico, that great care had to be taken to withhold
information that might set him off. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a
briefing.” New York magazine ran a piece nearly 4,000 words long, “The
Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden: The President’s Mental
Decline Was Like a Dark Family Secret for Many Elite Supporters.” It
included the report of one such supporter, a guest at a 2023 White House
event, who came away “open to an idea…previously dismissed as right-wing
propaganda: The president may not really be the acting president after
all.”

Carl Bernstein went on CNN a few days after the debate to relate that
several people “very close to President Biden…are adamant that what we
saw the other night…is not a one-off, that there have been 15, 20
occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared
somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed.” Bob Woodward,
Bernstein’s Washington Post colleague from 50 years ago, and his
co-author of the bestseller about Watergate, All the President’s Men,
wrote a book about the Biden Administration, War, published on October
15, 2024. He spoke to several people who attended Biden fundraisers in
2023. One said that “Biden was ‘frighteningly awful.’ It was ‘like your
87-year-old senile grandfather’ wandering around the room, saying to
women guests, ‘your eyes are so beautiful.’”

Democracy and Darkness

Though The Washington Post is not a lone violator, I’ve chosen to
discuss how journalists did, but mostly did not, cover the story of Joe
Biden’s decline by concentrating on that paper for a couple of reasons.
One is that, to the best of my knowledge, no other media outlet that was
AWOL on this story from 2020 through June 2024 has had the lack of
self-awareness, or perhaps the surplus of disingenuousness, to scold the
Democratic establishment for failing to be forthright with the public.
If The Washington Post is not part of the Democratic establishment, then
it is certainly the house organ or hometown paper for it, and has been
for many years. Given that fact, and given the record of what the Post
did and did not say about Biden during his presidency, it takes
remarkable chutzpah for the Post to run an editorial three days after
the election titled “Trying to Protect Biden, Democrats Sacrificed Their
Credibility.” Their credibility?

In 1982, when President Ronald Reagan was urging greater resolve against
the Soviet Union, and the Solidarity labor movement was striving to
secure human rights in Poland, Susan Sontag delivered a speech that
shocked and dismayed fellow leftist intellectuals. Communism, she told
them, is “Fascism—successful Fascism.” In service of the overriding
“wish not to give comfort to ‘reactionary’ forces,” Sontag continued,
“people on the left have willingly or unwillingly told a lot of lies.”
And many of those lies wound up in print:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between
1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation
or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about
the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause.
Can it be that our enemies were right?

We can update Sontag’s thought experiment. Imagine someone whose only
source of news about Joe Biden between 2020 and 2024 was The Daily Wire
or The Washington Free Beacon, and someone else in the same period whose
only source was CNN or The Washington Post. Which news consumer would
have been better informed about the realities of Biden’s cognitive
decline? Which one would have been less surprised that the Biden who
showed up at the June 27 debate appeared, in the language of the Post’s
November 8 editorial, “dazed, confused, tired and inaudible”? The answer
should give many people pause.

The other reason to focus on the Post is that, among legacy media
outlets, it made one of the earliest, most aggressive commitments to
fusing political journalism and political activism. “Democracy Dies in
Darkness” became The Washington Post’s official slogan in February 2017,
one month after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was a clear signal that
the Post was positioning itself as the primary news source for the
anti-Trump “Resistance,” which became a political force at the same
time.

The paper’s mis-coverage of Joe Biden’s decline strongly indicates that
this synthesis has not been a success, and may not be feasible. It isn’t
the only sign. On October 25, the Post announced that it would endorse
neither Trump nor Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million, a
little more than one-thousandth of his currently estimated net worth,
wrote in the paper on October 28 that his decision was a response to
surveys showing that journalism was the least trusted profession in
America. Given that reality, he said, presidential endorsements were a
pointless self-indulgence: they swayed nobody’s vote, but did “create a
perception of bias” and a “perception of non-independence.”

The Post’s subscribers were neither convinced nor appeased. By October
29, according to National Public Radio’s media reporter, 250,000 had
canceled their subscriptions, about 10% of the entire subscriber base,
causing, in NPR’s words, “something of a calamity” for the paper. Though
it was easy to find appeals on social media asking subscribers not to
take their anger at the Post’s owner and management out on its
employees, there was a certain logic, even integrity, to the cancelers’
decision—especially those who were part of the 2016-17 “Trump Bump,” the
surge in subscriptions to news sources regarded as Resistance allies.
Such readers were responding to the Post’s decision not to endorse
Harris by saying, in effect, “I thought we had a deal. An
understanding.” They did not come up with that idea by themselves, nor
did they have any real problem with either the perception or the fact of
bias and non-independence if it meant resisting Donald Trump.

It’s always tempting and almost always futile to want things both ways.
Like other legacy media outlets, The Washington Post aspires to be
viewed as an honest, rigorous evaluator of competing arguments and murky
or disputed factual questions, but also as an active participant in the
political contest, reliably supporting the forces of light by opposing
the forces of darkness. Among the reasons this doesn’t work is that when
a legacy media outlet does a better job at providing a safe space for
the children of light, assuring them that their sensibilities will be
respected and reflected in the soft glow of their laptops and
smartphones, it does a worse job of getting any other voters to pay
attention and reconsider their views. In a New York magazine issue
devoted to the media industry, published just before the November
election, one television executive said, “If half the country has
decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not
reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A
Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”

There was a Trump victory and mainstream media is not dead, at least in
the sense of being out of business. Whether it retains any ability to
make a political difference, which is what the executive was talking
about, is a separate and harder question. If comparing Trump to Hitler
for the past nine years did not prevent the 2024 comeback, there’s no
reason to believe that saying the same thing even louder will move any
needles in the next four years. I predict: a) that at some point between
November 2024 and January 2029, a legacy media outlet will publish an
op-ed contending that Trump is not merely like Hitler, or as bad as
Hitler, but actually worse than Hitler; and b) that five days after it
appears, people will have forgotten it.

With no apparent way to change the thinking of people who don’t already
share its worldview, mainstream media can do little more than flatter
and increase the insularity of its core audience, the NPR-tote bag
demographic. One popular lawn sign in the 2024 campaign season read,
“Harris-Walz: Obviously.” In other words, if you would even consider
casting a vote for Donald Trump, you’re worth disdaining but also so
dense and/or bigoted that efforts to persuade you would be a waste of
time. By providing mood music in an echo chamber, legacy media is not
just ineffectual but actively harmful for the Democratic Party,
encouraging the dubious but perilously comforting belief that the appeal
of its politicians, policies, and rhetoric is quite broad. Thus misled,
Democrats come up with ploys like Tim Walz or White Dudes for Harris,
which squander opportunities or succeed in insulting a target audience.

Even though the legacy media’s forfeiture of political significance is
self-inflicted, one can view its decline as both justified and
lamentable. It remains the case that Americans who love Trump, Americans
who loathe Trump, and Americans at various points in the middle must
find a way to share a country. And because that country is a republic,
the sharing requires not just forbearance and restraint but also some
basis on which collective deliberation can be coherent. We’re entitled
to our own opinions, Daniel Patrick Moynihan often said, but not to our
own facts.

But if every institution that pronounces on which facts are real and
which are bogus turns out to indulge its partisan or ideological bias,
we end up on a slippery slope where skepticism leads to cynicism and
culminates in solipsism. Since I’m just as good as you, my facts are
just as good as your facts. This attitude, seemingly proud and defiant,
turns out to jeopardize republicanism. The lack of trust, and the lack
of institutions that are trustworthy, reinforce each other. This
downward spiral renders a republic more susceptible to shrewd
manipulations of public opinion, as people are disposed to believe what
confirms their worldview rather than what is true—or, rather, to believe
that the only test of whether a statement is true is that it confirms
their worldview. A self-governing nation that travels this road will
eventually vindicate Thomas Hobbes’s contemptuous opinion that democracy
always turns out to be “no more than an aristocracy of orators.”'