Trump Derangement Syndrome has become horribly over-diagnosed. Now, anyone who expresses doubts about his wondrous abilities – or just fails to repeat the White House’s preferred talking points – risks being branded a “TDS” sufferer. It’s boring.
Still, there remains a large faction of elite journalists, social-media influencers and political actors who loathe Donald Trump with a pathological intensity and who feel their mission in life must be to undermine him by whatever means necessary. They have spent the last decade condemning Trump and his supporters as conspiracy loons even as they leap from one dark theory to the next – Trump is a Russian asset! A closet Nazi! An Al Capone-style mobster! A serial rapist and possibly even a pedophile! – without stopping to question the nature of their obsession.
The new favorite postulation is that the President has dementia and is dying.
At Davos this week, photographs of Trump revealed a large purple bruise on one of his hands. This delighted certain media outlets. The Daily Beast crowed about his “chronic health issue” and reminded its readers of its earlier reporting on other visible bruises on Trump’s skin and his swollen ankles – or “cankles.” Others scoffed about his rambling speeches this week, and his erratic aggression in the build-up to and throughout the World Economic Forum. The suggestion, issued over and over with heavy doses of schadenfreude, is that his mind has gone.
“To think we were concerned about Biden’s mental faculties!” exclaimed Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times’s chief foreign affairs commentator. And that, for many, is a clinching argument: conservative media outlets spent years mocking Biden for his senility, yet how silent they are now.
There’s no doubt that Trump is old. He’s 79. Assuming he lives until the summer of 2028, he will become the oldest ever serving US president. Elderly men start to break down physically. The White House press team has confirmed that Trump suffers from chronic venous insufficiency, a condition not uncommon in men of his vintage.
But the suggestion that Trump’s mental and physical decline is being covered up by a subservient media is clearly a political attack, often repeated by the same journalists who refused to admit that Joe Biden was unwell throughout his presidential term.
In fact, the Trump-Biden health comparison is so unfair as to be odious. The way the mainstream press failed to cover Biden’s ill-health ought to go down as one of the great media scandals in history. As Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson detailed in their book, Original Sin, which conveniently only came out after Biden left office, the former president’s inner circle constantly shielded him from scrutiny because he was so frail. Tapper and Thompson accuse Biden’s team of “denial and gaslighting,” of framing any attacks on Biden’s health as right-wing propaganda. But every Democrat in Washington knew, deep down, that Biden wasn’t well: it was just easier to lie to the world than to admit the truth.
Biden was hidden away for large amounts of his time in office, so much so that the full extent of his decline only became irrefutable on June 24, 2024 in that infamous first presidential debate, when the former commander-in-chief appeared utterly lost and incapable of making sense.
Trump, by contrast, never stops performing for the public. His energy levels are remarkable for a man of his age. He may ramble, but he has always rambled in speeches, as anybody who attended any of his rallies in 2016 can attest. He has always been erratic, too, in his approach to both domestic and international affairs.
One might say the same of Biden, who had a childhood stammer and a bizarre tendency to say precisely the wrong thing. But the troubling aspect of Biden’s time in power was not how much he talked, but how little. His press conferences were curtailed; his public appearances carefully stage-managed to disguise his waning faculties.
It’s not ideal for such old men to lead the free world. The presidency is an exhausting job for a man or woman at any age. But the glee with which so many Trump critics now seize on any sign of his physical or mental weakness – as well as the desperate attempts to draw parallels with Biden – smacks of an unhealthy hatred. And the public aren’t buying it: even as the President’s job approval rating dips, a New York Times/Siena poll found that a large majority disagree with the notion that “Donald Trump is just too old to be an effective president.”
Who, one wonders, is gaslighting whom?
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
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