This brings me to what is for my money the funniest part of this whole not-actually-funny thing: a sentence from the journalist Peter Baker’s New York Times article about the question of Trump’s brain. (Emphasis mine.)

While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated—and with such profound consequences.

As the New Yorker has its famed two-step, this is a classic Timesmaneuver: carefully sidestepping the tricky commitments of describing reality—What if somebody suspects that I think things???—and reporting only that people have opinions. “Forensically debated”! Signs and wonders.

Ah yes, truly that is the news. Not that Donald Trump is demented and out of touch with reality; nor that by absolutely any definition of “stability” he is at best mid-collapse right now; nor that multiple times per day, he says and does things that are plainly and utterly disqualifying in the position he holds. The story is that people are debating whether any of that is true.