I did not watch Donald Trump’s two-hour breakdown at the CPAC conference, but it must have been incredibly bad, because more than a few journalists are asking why mainstream news outlets downplayed his lunacy.
As Amanda Marcotte noted the next day, mainstream outlets used euphemisms that failed to convey the disjointed, phantasmic nature of his raving, or his inability to stop. Bandy X. Lee, the Yale psychiatrist who has bucked her profession to sound the warning about Trump’s mental problems, puts it bluntly: “[We are] colluding on the most basic point: by telling ourselves that the mental unwellness we see is not what we are seeing.”
Part of the problem is that not that many people have seen the spectacle; two hours is a long time to listen to a crazy old paranoid’s foam-mouthed rambling. But enough people are talking and writing about it to make it clear we’ve gone from behavior that isn’t normal for a president to behavior that isn’t normal outside a dementia ward, and word is bound to spread.
Donald Trump has always created his own, better reality than the real one. That’s why all his buildings pretend to have more floors than they really do. This propensity for bullshit was well-known to the electorate, so obviously 63 million people didn’t care.
But it’s now beyond political considerations. The man is unfit for independent living, let alone high office. Lots of people in Washington know it but are too scared to do anything. They’ll soon face a day when not doing anything is even scarier, which is the day they will finally do something.