For about a fortnight, I have been offering readers a variation on a theme of insanity. The effort is paying off. During a September 11 memorial service this morning, the president of the United States said he was at ground zero in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack. "We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys ... grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘got to get out of here!’ And they literally lifted me up."
For two weeks, I have been saying he's insane and it's getting worse.
And lo, Donald Trump keeps proving me right.
But to truly appreciate the insanity, we must consider what he is trying to do. Trump believes deep in his bones that he's The Alpha. No matter what the situation, no matter who's involved, he believes he's the dominant figure in every room. He is the main character of a story he's telling about himself. (Not even 9/11 could interrupt the narrative. He famously lied about his building being the tallest in downtown Manhattan after the Twin Towers came down.) He has, as Paul Waldman put it last month, an "obsession with dominance."
"This is how he believes conflict, or really any relationship, works," Waldman wrote. "There is a stronger party and a weaker party; the stronger party shows they’re stronger by threatening or hurting the weaker party; and the weaker party capitulates. When it doesn’t actually work that way — because people, systems, and nations are more complicated than that — he’s at a loss. The only thing he can think of is to do the same thing, only harder."
The paradox of Trump's obsession with dominance can be seen in his relations with Canada and Iran. Canada is not surrendering to his threats. This morning, it announced retaliatory tariffs on US imports. Iran is not surrendering either. This morning, it announced it would keep widening the scope of war to include strikes on US oil interests in the Gulf. Both are standing up to him and Trump has no answer. Standing up to him wasn't in the story!
Waldman said this obsession with dominance is what makes Trump "such a loser." True, but I think it also makes him insane. Fewer people are listening to his story, so he increasingly turns to social media to reassert the authority he's lost. There, he can post pictures claiming that North America is one big US state, that the Strait of Hormuz is a US territory, that New Mexico has been renamed "New America" – all manner of imagery he believes demonstrates his dominance, no matter how detached they are from reality.
You would think a sitting president's insanity would make for banner headlines, but that's not the case. "Major media are afraid if they report the obvious fact that the president is crazy, he'll do something crazy to harm them," Mark Jacob, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune, wrote on Bluesky this morning. "That's one reason they're normalizing his craziness."
For months, Mark Jacobs has been trying to get the press corps to focus on Trump's crazed mind. In this interview with me (see below), the co-author of 11 books and writer of the Stop the Presses,a newsletter about the news, explains why normalizing insanity is favoritism by other means. "They think treating it as normal makes them look unbiased," Mark told me. "When the president invades a country like Venezuela, abducts its leader, chooses his successor and then grabs a huge share of their oil reserves, that’s not an 'oil deal' – it’s armed robbery. But the news media call it an oil deal because they think that’s objective. It’s not."
The president said Friday that "we could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries." I don't know where to start with that, except to say it's insane. Are DC reporters seeing what we're seeing?
National political reporters are certainly seeing it. They know Trump’s brain is broken. But their bosses would punish them if they said it loudly and clearly, because the bosses know Trump would punish their news organizations for reporting that. So they try to stay out of his crosshairs. It’s like if you’re in eighth grade and the school bully comes into class looking for a victim. You keep your eyes down and hope he walks past you. Mainstream media are behaving like that. So instead of sweeping stories saying Trump is out of his mind, they do piecemeal reporting on each individual crazy thing he does and leave it to the public to do the math.
It is insane to keep doing what Trump is doing in the face of a mounting backlash. Yet the press keep treating it as normal. Why?
Because they think treating it as normal makes them look unbiased. When the president invades a country like Venezuela, abducts its leader, chooses his successor and then grabs a huge share of their oil reserves, that’s not an “oil deal” – it’s armed robbery. But the news media call it an oil deal because they think that’s objective. It’s not. By normalizing it, they’re taking a side – and it’s the wrong side, I would say.
If there was ever a time for the press to be truly adversarial, it would be during a war against Iran that's going very badly, harming the people at home, and radicalizing the war president's base against him. Yet the press is virtually hands off.
When it comes to the Iran war, I have to push back on you a bit. The press has been handicapped by a lack of access. Unlike in the Iraq war, no journalists are embedded with the troops, and news conferences by the Pentagon are extremely rare. Journalists are reporting with the help of unidentified sources, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is giving polygraph tests to his underlings to try to root out leakers. The regime is trying to hide the war from the public – to “low-key it,” in Trump’s words. But even with those obstacles, there has been some high-impact war reporting. The New York Times, for example, did an analysis of the deadly attack on the Iranian girls school and found clear signs that the US was to blame, even though the regime still has not admitted that and Trump even blamed the Iranians for it. Could major media be doing more? Yes. Are they doing a bad job? I don't think so. They’ve actually been tougher on Trump’s war than on many of his other atrocities.
This administration is the most censorial of our lifetimes. The press corps isn't even pretending to be sanctimonious about free speech anymore. What happened?
This is really disappointing, John. You would think journalists would be more energetic in defending the free press. Hardly any industries are mentioned in the Constitution. Journalism is. Yet you had that shameful White House Correspondents' Dinner where reporters partied with their oppressors. There was video of NBC anchor Kristen Welker laughing with ethnic-cleansing czar Stephen Miller at the dinner, and weeks later, Trump called on the Federal Communications Commission to punish Welker for stating that Trump's political endorsements have had "mixed results.” The national press in general seems to have accepted the idea that they’re part of a game in which they ask questions and the regime lies, and everyone can go away thinking they’ve done their job, with the public completely ill-served. The press’s lame reaction to a president openly assaulting facts is either cowardice or complicity, or both.
What is the remedy to a press corps that's so deferential to GOP power?
People should support media that are outside the United States' legacy corporations. ProPublica, for example. And the United Kingdom-based Guardian is doing a better job of covering American politics than American outlets are. They’re certainly more willing to state blunt truths. As for US corporate media, there are a few signs of pushback. CBS is a lost cause now – owned by a Trump-friendly oligarch. But ABC has been rallying the public to help it fight off the FCC’s intimidation. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr clearly wants to silence “The View” and kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air. People need to support ABC’s efforts and boycott outlets that bend the knee to the dictator. The fight for honest media is the fight for our democracy. You can’t have one without the other.