Donald Trump has never been the candidate of coherence, self-control, and sanity. But his comments and conduct during this campaign season have truly gone off the deep end, and he seems increasingly confused and aged. You might not know all of that if you’re reading the headlines about his campaign—even while you might have heard plenty about how Kamala Harris wasn’t doing enough interviews or hadn’t proposed detailed enough policies.

To be sure, journalists should cover both candidates’ deficits. (And seemingly in response to media criticisms, Harris has started doing more interviews and putting out more detailed policies.) But they shouldn’t insist that in order to be fair, the candidates must be portrayed as if they are behaving similarly. A few recent moments for Trump and Harris in the campaign—and the respective headlines that followed—put this in very sharp relief.

Harris responds to questions coherently, even if she does sometimes employ the standard politician move of talking about what she wants instead of exactly what was asked. By contrast, the former president is so inarticulate and so often prone to long, rambling, disjointed soliloquies that many reporters seem to have decided their job is to act as Trump’s interpreter—to put into normal-human speech what they think the former president means. And that can be useful: No one (probably least of all the Republican Party) wants journalists to be Trump’s stenographers, simply penning down what he says and publishing it for the masses. It’s also obviously important to explain to readers what Trump says he will do when in office. But too often in this race, reporters (no doubt numbed by Trump’s nuttiness) have wound up paraphrasing the former president in ways that elide what sounds like total gibberish and perhaps even serious mental decline.

Earlier this month, for example, Trump went on the conservative Hugh Hewitt show and said that many migrants have “murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” and added, “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Setting aside that it is not true that scores of murderers are migrating into the U.S., Trump’s remark about murder genes echoes arguments long made by white supremacists that nonwhite people are genetically inferior and more prone to violence and crime. This is also far from the first time the former president has invoked this particular bit of racism. Trump has previously accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” and suggested that people are like racehorses—the better-bred ones are genetically faster and superior. To be clear, this is the theory behind the eugenics movement.

A candidate for president repeatedly trumpeting and endorsing eugenics theories seems like pretty big and shocking news.........

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