Two Things The Media Didn’t Report On

Trump appeared to drift off during a speech, and Alito gave a middle finger that ought to result in his recusal.

There are two stories you probably didn’t hear about from the mainstream media, but which I saw covered by substackers and citizen political commentators. Both are worth amplifying here.

The first story concerns what I believe is the vastly underreported danger that Trump’s pronounced mental decline poses, should he regain the White House. To help raise the alarm, I’ve posted many examples of Trump’s cognitive issues on social media, as well as published an interview of a top expert, John Gartner of Duty to Warn, about Trump’s alarming condition and inevitable decline. 

I keep waiting for the mainstream media to pick up the story more—especially when Trump appears to glitch in a major way, including what occurred this weekend when he spoke in Texas. In the meantime, I will continue to bring this to my own readers’ attention.

The second story concerns Justice Samuel Alito’s bias and blatantly partisan behavior. As my piece last week reported, Justice Alito allowed a U.S. flag to hang upside down at his home—a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement—just 11 days after the violent attack on the Capitol in January of 2021. Many rightfully demanded Alito recuse himself from January 6 cases. 

But Alito should recuse himself from LGBTQ rights cases, too, after his participation in a boycott of a beer company to protest trans inclusion. It’s hard to see, knowing what we know, how any LGBTQ parties could have faith that Alito could impartially rule on any case involving their rights.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these underreported stories in turn.

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Trump glitch

Over the weekend, Donald Trump gave a speech in Texas before the NRA. A few outlets reported on the horrific things he said. But he now repeats this same rhetoric at nearly every speech, so many in the media have stopped covering it as important despite the danger.

But there was one moment that caught many Trump watchers’ attention: when he suddenly stopped speaking for around half a minute. (Kudos to Robert Hubbell for highlighting this moment in his daily newsletter, too.)

You can watch the moment in the clip that I’ll post below. At first, if you’re like me, it seemed like he had taken a dramatic pause. Trump stood in silence as QAnon music swelled in the background. 

But the longer it went on, the more awkward it became. Was it a teleprompter error? Or did Trump pull a Mitch McConnell? His facial expressions also seemed to indicate confusion or hesitation. You can judge for yourself:

Screenshot from Biden HQ video on X

His defenders are claiming it was a teleprompter issue. Fine, and plausible, but normally when there’s a teleprompter error, Trump immediately improvs. He cracks jokes about the lousy tech guy who should be fired. He rails about crappy technology.

“They have it wrong on the teleprompter,” Trump once complained, after mispronouncing a single town’s name from his teleprompter. “But the good news is I don’t use the teleprompter too much. If I did, you would have been out of here a long time ago, because it gets very boring when you do the teleprompter deal.”

But he did none of that improvising here. And if he truly simply intended to create a dramatic, pregnant pause, as he listened wistfully to the creepy QAnon song “WWG1WGA,” it was still super weird, even for a “let that sink in” moment.

And let’s face it: Had Joe Biden stood on stage for 33 seconds saying nothing, looking off to the side, his face occasionally straining, there would be nonstop coverage by the major media citing it as evidence of poor mental health. They would certainly demand to know what’s wrong with him. But the media is giving Trump a pass on this.

Experts have been warning about Trump’s increasing signs of cognitive decline, including apparent aphasia and the switching of people in his head, from Obama to Biden, Pelosi to Haley. He’s fallen asleep numerous times in court in Manhattan. This moment could have been a part of that general cognitive condition, or it could have just been just another objectively weird moment by Trump. But in either case, the media should be demanding answers from his campaign. This should be a much bigger deal than it currently is.

Alito bias and calls for recusal

Congressional leaders, from Sen. Dick Durban (D-IL) who chairs the Judiciary Committee to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), have called on Justice Alito to recuse himself from January 6 cases given the controversy around his household flying an insurrectionist symbol shortly after the Capitol was attacked and ransacked.

We need to add another call for Alito’s recusal: any cases involving LGBTQ rights.

As Chris Geidner reported in his Substack newsletter, Justice Alito participated in a politically-driven boycott of Bud Light by selling his shares of Anheuser-Busch and buying shares in Coors. 

To understand why this is a political statement, we need to review some context. Bud Light had partnered briefly last year with an online transgender celebrity, Dylan Mulvaney. The brand had asked Mulvaney, along with many other online influencers, to promote the beer brand’s $15,000 giveaway during March Madness. They had given Mulvaney a single commemorative can of beer with her face on it. It should have been no big deal.

That’s not how the far right saw it. They used the moment to flex political muscle and punish the company—and send a clear message to others—with a widespread boycott of Bud Light for daring to work with anyone trans. Right wing personalities such as Kid Rock even filmed himself shooting up cans of the beverage, though he has quickly since gone back to drinking it.

The move against Bud Light gained significant steam when right-wing influencer and online stochastic terrorist, Chaya Raichik, picked up and amplified the story widely, including most likely to Justice Alito. Geidner’s connecting of the dots here is impressive. He writes,

At 4:37 p.m. on Sunday, August 13, 2023, far-right, anti-LGBTQ influencer Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok posted a pre-transition photograph of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, calling her “a dude,” on Twitter, now known as X.

… the post had more than 8 million views, per X’s data, most of which were likely amassed in the days after it was posted last summer. As with most of what Raichik does, the post was intended to inflame the passions of anti-trans people online, and it worked…

…[S]omething happened more quietly as well: According to a periodic transaction report posted but now unavailable in the Federal Judicial Financial Disclosure Reports database, Justice Sam Alito sold at least some of his stock in Anheuser-Busch and bought stock in Molson Coors on Monday, August 14, 2023.

Did Justice Alito respond to Raichik’s hateful messaging and join the boycott in order to financially punish Bud Light? It sure seems possible, even probable. Indeed, there is no obvious other reason for Alito to execute the sale and the purchase in this fashion and to lose money on the transaction. Further, the timing, coming on the heels of Raichik’s hateful post, is more than coincidental. Any reasonable person would agree that Alito likely intended to join in sending a message to the makers of Bud Light—and any other company thinking of working with trans people in its marketing. At the very least, his actions create a strong appearance of bias.

This means, again, that Alito is in plain violation of Canon 5 of the new SCOTUS ethical code he just signed on to: “A Justice Should Refrain From Political Activity.” The fact that Alito so despises trans people that he would actually sell his shares in a company and buy a competitor’s stock, all in outraged response to a single Instagram campaign involving a single trans woman, demonstrates that he cannot reasonably be assumed to be impartial.

No one should hold out any hope that Justice Alito will actually recuse himself from LGBTQ cases. And a few very important ones relating to the rights of states to limit gender affirming care for minors and limit participation in extracurricular sports by trans youth are coming up before the Court soon. 

But for the media and judicial watchers to remain silent on this, and to not demand answers from Alito, is an invitation for him and others to engage in further improper political activity. Even if we cannot force Alito to recuse himself, we can and should make this as uncomfortable for him as possible. And the public must let Chief Justice Roberts know what we think about how poorly the ethical rules are being enforced.