U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks to the media before boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, U.S., en route to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, August 21, 2026.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg says she gets emails all the time from frustrated readers asking why the Times does not fully cover the extent of President Donald Trump’s advanced age and mental ‘decline’ “like they did Biden’s.”
One of those answers, she said, involve the problem of covering the sheer quantity of it all.
“I mean, one is just that there’s only so much room, and scandal expands to fit the space available,” Goldberg wrote.
Trump’s erratic behavior appears to be mounting as he and his party face a possible drubbing in the midterms, with Trump posting images declaring the Strait of Hormuz “new U.S. territory.” Stanford political science professor and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul called this and other presidential posts “just crazy.”
“We are no longer a serious country, let alone a respected great power. Hoping the damage [done] right now can be reversed, but it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of humility,” McFaul wrote.
Trump also likes to attack women in public, and he gets dragged for claiming he was America's greatest president — a post that neglected to mention 11 of America's former chief executives, including the most influential recent Republican president, Ronald Reagan.
At the same time, Goldberg says she’s not sure if she even sees “a marked untethering” — just more of it. Significantly more.
“The A.I. memes are not new. There was the one in which he kind of compared himself to Jesus, or a doctor. And so part of the difficulty, I think, and this has been the difficulty writing about Trump all along, is that it is very difficult to maintain the appropriate level of shock, because you just cannot help but get inured to this over the last 10 years,” Goldberg wrote. “And it’s a kind of constant struggle to try and maintain some connection to the frame of reference we had for what was considered acceptable or decent a decade ago.”
But also, Goldberg said newspaper reporters are mindful that American voters know exactly what kind of person they voted for, because they voted for him twice.
“[T]his is the man who was re-elected,” said Goldberg. “It’s not like a situation like John Fetterman, where there was almost a bait-and-switch [where] … people thought that they were electing one man, and then he became someone totally different. This is Trump. It’s always been Trump.”
Goldberg said his erratic behavior may be more visible to more people now, at least for Republicans.
“There was this kind of scrim of great-man inevitability, as if he might have been some kind of mad genius instead of just mad. So as his poll numbers go down, and as his catastrophes metastasize, that mythos that once surrounded him becomes more and more threadbare. But this is the same person who bankrupted casinos. This is the same person that caused me to cry my eyes out in terror when he was elected in 2016,” said Goldberg.