Mark Jacob on how the press ignores the biggest Trump story ("He's clearly mentally unfit for office")
Mark Jacob on how the press ignores the biggest Trump story
"The president of the United States is clearly mentally unfit for office."
Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson
Mar 24, 2026
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/mark-jacob-interview-trump-coverage
A major story that probably doesn’t get talked about enough is the reality that the president of the United States is, well, out of his mind.
You see it on display every single day. Whether he’s gloating over the deaths of revered Americans, fabricating conversations with foreign officials and Americans (he did both yesterday) who always seem to have nothing but praise for him, sleeping through on camera events (he did this yesterday too), making mathematically impossible claims, touting made-up accomplishments, or mangling the English language to the point where he just pretends his creations (“mutilization”) are actual words, Trump rarely appears in public without raising grave concerns about his mental state.
This puts the mainstream media in a difficult position. While calling out Trump’s crazed condition has the virtue of being true, it runs the risk of making reporters seem like partisans who are unfair to the president and thus unworthy of access. As a result, White House journalists too often opt for timidity by doing stenography (never mind that Trump is almost always lying), by sanitizing his rantings and making them seem far more coherent than they really are, and/or by suggesting both sides are to blame for the rapidly deteriorating state of the country.
Mark Jacob, author of the Stop the Presses newsletter and a former editor at the Chicago Tribune, has been sounding the alarm for a while about the need for political reporters to be more bold and ambitious in the way they cover Trump.