Not really, there were a lot of people that suspected and rumored, but the press generally didn’t say much about it until Bush was president. The media was more concerned with the economy and Iran-Contra type issues, and didn’t talk about his health a lot. Late night hosts and comedians made jokes about his chin flaps, hair that never moved, and called him an animatronic or puppet. Not a lot about his mental state, other than disdain for his choices, not really health related. After it was publicly acknowledged there was of course a ton of ‘As we all long suspected’ type noises.
Which would suggest that Trump’s actual mental decline is far worse than his public presentation implies.
That’s pretty much always been known. Otherwise we’d know what meds he was on.
It wasn’t as bad as Trump, but I’m going to disagree somewhat with the general idea here. It wasn’t discussed on the news as much, but it was mentioned in comedy and satire. The cold war wasn’t over so displaying weakness in the President would have been bad.
I don’t know if I can link a video here, but to give an example, please look up the video for “Land of Confusion” by Genesis. This video had heavy rotation on mtv and was nominated for video of the year. This was 1986-87. Reagan left office in 1989.
