THE PRESS DOESN'T HAVE A "BIAS TOWARD COHERENCE" -- IT HAS A BIAS TOWARD REPUBLICANS

Tom Nichols has a theory as to why the press seems more concerned with President Biden's age than Donald Trump's troubling pronouncements:

This is not “bias” in the political sense. It is, as Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg put it, a bias toward coherence, the inability to accept—and say—that one of the presidential campaigns is completely bonkers. “Trump overwhelms us with nonsense,” Jeff notes, and so, when confronted with Trump’s obvious mental instability, we work backwards: “Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts.”

The result of this bias is that the press too often continues to present what should be appalling, even horrifying information as if it is just part of the normal give-and-take of a political campaign: Trump goes to Las Vegas and rants about sharks, and the press, likely trying to appear unbiased, instead pulls out a dull nugget about Trump’s mention of not taxing tips. Trump vows to destroy the American civil service, and the headlines talk about his “plans to increase presidential power.”

Why? Because it is not in the American journalistic tradition to say: Today in Las Vegas, one of the two major candidates said things so rabidly toxic and incoherent that they raised doubts about his sanity.

I don't see why we should question Trump's sanity when he "vows to destroy the American civil service" -- that sounds like a power grab by a would-be authoritarian who's very much in command of his senses. The shark rant was much nuttier, although it's a roundabout way for Trump to say something he wrongly but sanely believes, as do millions of other consumers of mainstream right-wing propaganda: that all forms of non-fossil-fuel energy (in this case, battery-powered boats) are both dangerous and ridiculous.

But even if you believe that Trump's brain is full of failing neurons rather than right-wing disinformation, it's hard to believe that the media has a categorical bias toward portraying major-party candidates as coherent. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had months of stories in the media questioning the mental fitness of Joe Biden.

What we have instead is a bias toward normalizing Republicans, a process that's usually accompanied by an "othering" of Democrats. This has been going on for decades: Walter Mondale was a gloomy wimp, Michael Dukakis was an effete Ivy League weirdo, Al Gore was a prissy egghead, Hillary Clinton was a cackling ballbuster. Their opponents were Real Americans, fond of country music, pickup trucks, and plain-spoken common sense. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden fought against this narrative and won some victories, but the idea that Republicans are normal and Democrats are peculiar is ingrained in our politics, and allows Republicans to embrace genuinely extreme policies -- on guns, abortion, climate change, taxation, regulation, torture, and many other issues -- while Democrats are the ones branded as out-of-step extremists. It doesn't help that Democrats regularly praise at least some Republicans (a favor that's never returned), or that Democrats regularly proclaim that some fellow party members really are ideologically beyond the pale, something Republicans know will lead to instant banishment if it's attempted in their party.

It's because we're accustomed to all this that our political culture struggles to define Trump as a mentally ill person or (more accurately, I think) as a dangerous radical. But we're used to marginalizing Democrats. In Biden's case, we're marginalizing him based on perceived mental fitness, but we nearly always do this to Democrats in some way or another, unless, like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, they're very good at fighting back.