Don't just take my word for it. Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star, who has spent more time than most listening to Trump speeches and meticulously detailing his relentless lies, confidently declared that the CPAC address was the most bizarre of Trump’s presidency, and that was only halfway into Trump’s marathon presentation of mangled gibberish on Saturday.

The overall media disconnect was so striking that even a U.S. senator beseeched the press to do better:

x If you watched that two hour speech, which was genuinely next level bonkers and wrote a headline like Ã¢ÂÂan energized trump attacks DemocratsÃ¢ÂÂ you should maybe get better at writing headlines. Ã¢ÂÂ Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) March 3, 2019

Trump's creepy CPAC address is just the latest example of his public unraveling, which is why it's odd that we're at the point where the Republican husband of a Trump adviser is willing to openly raise concerns about the president's stability, but most of the D.C. press is not.

Luckily, some journalists are addressing the key issues. Al Jazeera English's Mehdi Hassan recently hosted a podcast titled "Why Won’t the Media Discuss Trump’s Mental Instability?" And following one of Trump's signature Rose Garden performance art routines, Esquire's Charles Pierce stressed, "If your uncle behaved like the president behaved on Friday, you'd hide his car-keys, lock up the booze, and drive him to the neurologist."

But why the larger hesitation among the press? Why the lack of necessary truth-telling? It's the same reason lots of large news organization, to this day, won't call Trump a liar, even though he's on pace to tell more than 16,000 lies while in office. Logically, the "liar" ban makes no sense. It's only until you realize it's in place for political reasons that you see why it's done. News outlets don't want to take heat from conservatives and from the administration for calling Trump a liar. So even though they've documented that he lies all the time, reporters opt for timid words like "falsehoods" to soften the blow.

The same is true with regard to Trump's unstable behavior. There's not one working member of the Washington press corps who watched Trump's epic and unsettling CPAC meltdown and thought, “He's seems stable, and I have no questions about his mental capacity." They all know it's a pressing issue. But newsrooms don't want to suffer the backlash—the shouts of "Liberal media bias!"—that would rain down on journalists who tackle the story, even though it's so obviously newsworthy.

Also, my hunch is the press simply doesn't want to open the Pandora's box by suggesting the president of the United States often appears to be unstable because, of course, that would require the media to aggressively cover that story. Instead, the press seems far more content to maintain the narrative that Trump is somewhat of an eccentric and gives "fiery," "wide-ranging" speeches. In other words, Trump once again has intimidated the press, and effectively set up barriers for what’s to be covered. Following the stunning CPAC debacle, is there any kind of public behavior that Trump could unleash that would trigger an honest newsroom debate about Trump's stability? That seems doubtful. And Trump knows it.

I understand there's long-established hesitancy on the part of specialists to try to diagnose somebody if they’re not a direct patient. But even on that front, more and more experts are speaking out (e.g., "Mr. Trump is a sociopath"). “We, the undersigned mental health professionals, believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States," reads a petition signed by 70,000 mental health professionals.

When it comes to absent coverage of Trump's mental stability, I'm not suggesting it needs to be clinically based. But when the president of the United States gives a nearly incomprehensible, two-hour, flag-hugging performance, the press cannot and should not look away and pretend that Trump's behavior even remotely approaches what passes for normal in American politics, let alone for an occupant of the Oval Office.

The president is not well. And that's a helluva news story.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.