The powerful media compulsion to normalize him as president

Rick Wilson (anti-Trump Republican pundit) asks:

Why’s it so hard for us to say out loud that Trump has lost his mind?

Reporter Joy Reid has an answer that I don’t really get.

Chalk it up to the powerful media compulsion to normalize him as president. He is president, so the things he says and does are done in the name of the office, and so media writ large strains to import even the crazy stuff into the normal formula for covering a president.

I don’t get why it’s not the other way around. I don’t get why the media compulsion is to normalize him as president as opposed to normalizing the office by refusing to normalize him. Why him at the expense of the office rather than the office at the expense of him?

Why, in other words, don’t they see the office as more important than and less temporary than this one aberrant guy?

Especially since a great many of the things he says and does really are not done in the name of the office. They’re done while he is president, but not in the name of the office. His ridiculous blurts about Debra Messing and Kanye West and similar irrelevancies aren’t done in the name of the office, they’re just explosions from his id, which (I would think) is exactly why the guy ought to be reported separately from the office much of the time.

She might just mean they do it so that they can go on being White House reporters after Trump is back in Manhattan, which would be not so much compulsion as self-interested ass-protecting.

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