GAVIN NEWSOM IS SUPPOSED TO STAY IN HIS LANE

John Stoehr believes that Donald Trump has dementia, and that the press is in denial about this self-evident fact.

You may have noticed something. I used to talk about the president’s dementia pretty regularly, but haven’t in months. That’s because I’ve lost faith. I used to believe the Washington press corps would see the plainly obvious. I no longer believe that. The hypocrisy is too baked in.

The double standard that prevents political reporters from seeing Donald Trump’s totalitarianism is the same double standard that prevents them from seeing his dementia. He doesn’t make choices. Only Democrats do. He can’t be held responsible for what he says.

Regualr readers know that I don't believe Trump has dementia -- mild cognitive impairment, probably, but not dementia. I think what's mistaken for dementia is mostly ignorance and a head full of Fox News oversimplifications. But I don't want to get into that now, because Stoehr and I agree that Trump talks a lot of nonsense, and the press seems determined to normalize it.

I know why the press does this. I'll explain below.

Stoehr thinks Gavin Newsom's mockery of Trump's social-media style will open the press's eyes to Trump's fascist tendencies and cognitive deficiencies.

... the California governor has been pursuing a media strategy that is a model for other ambitious Democrats to follow. It also has the potential to expose Trump’s weakness. And he’s doing that by the most unlikely means: copying Trump’s confabulated style.

At a news conference last week, a reporter asked Newsom a question about his tweets mocking Trump's prose style. Stoehr quotes Newsom's answer:

“I hope it’s a wake up call for the president of the United States,” he said. “I’m just following his example. If you have issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he’s putting out, as president. To the extent that it’s gotten some attention, I’m pleased, but I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets and Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”

But the press will never get it, for a simple reason: Our political culture puts the two parties in separate lanes. Trump's incoherent-simpleton social media posts keep him comfortably in the Republican lane. Newsom's parodies are the work of a Democrat refusing to stay in his party's lane.

The nature of the Republican lane was codified in the Reagan era. Ronald Reagan's utterances were aggressive and simplistic. Using simple language, he verbally attacked Russia as a force of pure evil, and he mocked Democrats and liberals with humor that was more mean-spirited than it appeared.

Reagan's electoral success, especially with blue-collar white men, led the press to conclude that Reagan was talking in the simple, elemental language of real Americans with dirt under their fingernails.

A few years into the Reagan era, Oliver North's self-righteous hostility during the Iran-contra hearings gave the media a variation on the Republican temnplate. Republicans didn't have to be winky and folksy like Reagan -- instead, they could be blustery, contemptuous, menacing macho egomaniacs wrapped in the American flag. That was seen a variation of the True Voice Of The Volk. (During those hearings, Ollie North probably invented both right-wing talk radio and modern country music.)

In 1988, George H.W. Bush, a New England preppie, decided to run using this Republican persona. He ate pork rinds and campaigned with country stars. He mocked his opponent -- a son of immigrants -- as an elitist. And he won big. He ran a vicious campaign, but the press wasn't appalled, because he had learned to speak The True Language Of The People and Michael Dukakis hadn't.

We see this pattern repeating in the two campaigns of Poppy Bush's son. George W. Bush was simple-minded and inarticulate, but that meant he was "authentic," and both Al Gore and John Kerry were elitist phonies. And now we're in the Trump era, and the press is so certain that misinformation and macho bluster are the true Song of America that Donald Trump can say anything and get away with it.

The press can't process Gavin Newsom's parodies of Trump because Newsom is far out of the lane Democrats are meant to occupy. Democrats are supposed to sound like brainiacs and approach conflict as low-pulse-rate conciliators. (See, for instance, the soft-spoken, soporific Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.) The two Democrats in the post-Reagan whose stardom the press has been willing to acknowledge, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, made their names calling for bipartisanship and comity. In his star-making 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama said that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America," an assertion that was utterly wrong. But he was talking the way Democrats are supposed to talk.

This is why the press can't learn the lesson Gavin Newsom is trying to teach. Republicans are expected to communicate in ways that are crude and ignorant; Democrats are expected to be nerds who keep the peace. If we had a single standard for all politicians, Newsom's approach might change mainstream political thinking -- though if we had a single standard for all politicians, what Newsom is doing wouldn't be necessary. In any case, we haven't had a single standard for the two parties in the last 45 years.