Michael Tomasky of The New Republic on Monday offered some praise to the New York Times for finally writing a lengthy article that dissects former President Donald Trump's mental fitness for the presidency.
In his latest column, Tomasky argued that the Times has been woefully inadequate in covering what should be the dominant story of the 2024 election campaign: Namely, that Trump on the campaign trail sounds, as Tomasky put it, "absolutely insane."
Nonetheless, he said that the Times' big Sunday feature on Trump's mental fitness was a definite step in the right direction.
"The gist of the piece argues — with statistical analyses of Trump’s tropes and speech patterns — that his rhetoric is very different from what it was in 2015 and 2016," Tomasky observed. "Which is to say, it’s worse in every way: more long-winded, more disconnected, more rambling; also coarser, far more prone to swearing. In sum, the article is devastating about whether Trump, who is now the old one in the race and who would be 82 at the end of a second term, is simply incapable on a mental level of doing the job of president."
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He then warned, however, that the paper would be doing Americans a great disservice if it made its coverage of Trump's mental health a one-off event.
"I hope the Times keeps finding ways to raise this question, and I hope other mainstream outlets follow," he wrote. "The first part of that equation shouldn’t be hard for the simple reason that Trump will keep cranking out material... this isn’t just a question of lies. It’s a question of whether he’s all there in the head."
