During a speech on Sunday night, Donald Trump repeatedly spoke as if Barack Obama were the current president. It wasn’t the first time. In recent speeches, Trump has also claimed to have beaten both Obama and George W. Bush in 2016. That’s when he wasn’t promising to use irrigation ditches to bring water to bathrooms or keep California’s forests damp.
It’s not that Trump hasn’t always been an egotistical, vindictive jackass with few concerns for whether his hateful, antisemitic, misogynistic, and racist rants had even a passing encounter with the truth. But this is different. In the 2024 campaign, and in the messages he posts to social media, Trump has been in a confused and addled state, one where he has frequently makes statements that are both incoherent and irreconcilable with reality.
Still, did you hear that President Joe Biden made a “gaffe”? Sure you did. Because the media not only devotes heavy coverage to Biden’s every hesitation or stumble, it goes out of its way to create them even when they don’t exist. All to promote a narrative that Biden is old and losing his grip, while Trump is somehow vigorous. That narrative isn’t just a clear disservice; it’s a signal measure of how willing major media outlets are to coddle Trump, savage Biden, and keep the nation in the dark.
Media Matters has pointed out that despite the barely three-year gap between the two men, Biden’s age gets mentioned almost four times as often. That means it logged 193 mentions on cable news over a four-day period. The media reinforces this with a hawk-like observation of Biden’s every utterance, ready to swoop on any perceived error.
But while the media is razor-focused on how smoothly Biden descends the stairs, this is Donald Trump:
The San Francisco Chronicle’s story about Trump’s speech on Friday focuses first on Trump’s call to shoot shoplifters on sight, but that kind of violent rhetoric is reflective of both Trump and his movement. It’s almost understandable. That’s not true of the points where Trump promises to irrigate bathrooms, claims that electric vehicles make their users “somewhat schizophrenic,” promises to keep the forests wet, or explains why you can’t have electric boats—something that he might want to explain to fishermen who have been using electric trolling motors for decades.
Biden may not always make the most skillful dismount from his bike, but he's not asking his audience to choose between electrocution and being eaten by a shark. The idea that you have to show a photo ID to buy a loaf of bread, that whales are being driven crazy by windmills, and that every EV is made in China aren’t just momentary brain farts. They’re part of Trump’s regular patter, cropping up in various recent speeches.
If there’s any merit in the idea that Trump’s claims regularly represent projection, it’s worth looking at his recent attacks on “deranged” special counsel Jack Smith, a “deranged” New York judge, “crazy” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and “lunatic” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. (Smith also earned a “deranged lunatic,” as if one insult weren’t enough.) In the words of third-graders everywhere at a level of rhetoric Trump surely understands: "I'm rubber, you're glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you."
Campaign Action
Trump’s recent statements aren’t just mean. They’re not just egotistical and monomaniacal. They are dangerously disconnected from reality. And it should fall on every media outlet to hammer home the senselessness of Trump’s statements. Every bizarre remark should be the focus of heavy media attention that makes clear Trump’s inability to carry on a reasoned conversation that involves real events in the real world.
Instead, we get a Newsweek article called “Joe Biden's Gaffes Are Getting Harder To Ignore,” which covers such huge events as Biden failing to shake someone’s hand at the end of a press conference; Biden saying that he visited the site of the Sept. 11 attacks a day after they occurred, rather than a few days after the attack; and a speech where Biden said nice things about the Congressional Black Caucus even though the event was organized by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
That article is just one of at least three that Newsweek has run in the last month, each one of which has included experts warning against the “perception that [Biden] is too old to be an effective president” and suggestions such as "Perhaps this trend will embolden someone like Gavin Newsom of California to throw his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination for 2024.”
The Biden Gaffe Watch is on high alert for moments when they can drop an article title like “‘It Is Evening, Isn’t It?’ An 80-Year-Old President’s Whirlwind Trip,” in The New York Times, or, “Biden Slips On Air Force One Stairs After Staff Try To Prevent Major Falls—As Gaffes Raise Concerns About His Age” in Forbes.
Yes, Forbes got all that into a single headline. The article itself is a dedicated effort of gaffe-watchery, having a timeline that shows Biden making some kind of misstep or misstatement about once every 10 days—including such horrors as fumbling the name of a New Zealand rugby team and using “God save the queen, man” as an expression of his frustration over a silly question about gun violence. And yes, on Biden Gaffe Watch, that counts. If that lengthy list of Biden “blunders” is too much for you, don’t worry. Forbes also has a video.
Every single one of these articles follows the same pattern: Here’s something wrong that Biden said, here are claims that people are really concerned about his age, here are polls saying people think he’s too old, and finally, here are experts chiming in—often by providing quotes from Republican politicians or pundits.
Oh, and if the articles get around to it, they may toss in a paragraph, way down at the very bottom, that mentions Trump is also an old guy.
What the articles never get around to mentioning is that there is a fundamental difference between Biden making an error or a verbal gaffe, and Trump weaving a whole narrative—complete with people calling him “sir,” crazy whales, or killer batteries—that has no relationship to reality.
Failing to highlight that difference isn’t just bad journalism; it’s intentionally bad journalism designed to create a false equivalence. And that’s being generous.