For the press that headlined every Biden flub, Trump’s wild delusions aren’t news. At least now we have a word to describe their failure.
Let’s start here: At a Moms for “Liberty” event on August 31, Donald Trump said this:
The transgender thing is incredible. Think about it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child, and many of these children, 15 years later, say “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”
Incredible? Absolutely, and rightfully so: What Trump is telling us is literally beyond credibility, because it bears no resemblance to reality. Schools aren’t performing unauthorized gender-changing operations, or operations of any kind (beyond possibly the school nurse pulling a splinter out of a child’s finger). Not even the wildest radical is proposing that they should. And nobody is looking back on some surgery-at-school that happened 15 years ago.
This goes way beyond any political lying we’ve seen in the past. Trump isn’t exaggerating a statistic, cherry-picking a quote, or spinning some actual incident to his advantage. He’s not implying something nasty about an opponent that can’t be proved either way, or making some bizarre prediction that may not come to pass. Instead, he’s inviting us to come live in a completely delusional world of his construction.
And in case you think he just got carried away, he repeated the claim Saturday in Wisconsin.
You might imagine that a presidential candidate going so far off the deep end would be news. But for most of the mainstream press, it wasn’t. The New York Times covered the MfL event, but didn’t mention that particular part: “Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny.” Many newspapers, including The Washington Post, used AP’s article, which also said nothing about schools doing surgeries: “Moms for Liberty fully embraces Trump and widens role in national politics as election nears“.
Just another normal event on a normal candidate’s normal schedule.
The day before, the NYT published an analysis of the two candidates’ ideas for making housing more affordable. They gave it a very both-sides headline: “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.“
Harris’ housing ideas are relatively straightforward policies amenable to ordinary political and economic analysis: tax cuts to stimulate construction of affordable housing and a $25K benefit targeted at first-time home buyers. Trump’s “housing” idea is a side-effect of his insane proposal for “mass deportation”: If millions of undocumented people are forced to leave the country or herded into detention camps, the couches they’ve been sleeping on will become available to American citizens.
Nothing monstrous here. Just a normal presidential candidate’s policy idea, whose effectiveness economists might “doubt”. Former NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan quotes former NYT reporter (and Pulitzer-prize winner) James Risen: “At first, I thought this was a parody.”
Speaking of economists, Thursday Trump appeared before the Economic Club of New York. A woman asked him what specific legislation he would propose to make childcare more affordable. Here was his answer:
Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.
Got that? The NYT looked at that answer and divined a policy proposal: tariffs. It disapproved of Trump’s proposal, saying that it was a 19th century proposal for a 21st century country. “Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers“. [1] But the fact that he was asked a serious question and responded with an incoherent ramble about something else — that wasn’t news.
The Washington Post thought the most significant thing Trump did Thursday was deepen his alliance with Elon Musk. Deep, deep in that article it summarized the childcare back-and-forth like this:
Trump made several other promises during his speech at the Economic Club of New York. … When asked about how he’d make child care more affordable, Trump suggested that he would help pay for it by placing taxes on foreign governments. “We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kinds of numbers we’re going to be taking in,” he said. He did not provide details or specifics about how this would work; experts have warned imposing tariffs on such a scale would risk triggering an international trade war.
Just a normal candidate explaining a normal policy amenable to normal critique. The word “suggested” does a lot of work here: It means that Trump’s words inspired WaPo’s three byline reporters to imagine a coherent proposal in which tariff revenue pays for childcare.
Oh, and Trump has an explanation for his rambles: It’s an art. He calls it “the weave”.
You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, “It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.”
It might be fair to see that explanation itself as evidence of insanity. But the NYT wrote an article taking it seriously. “Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.” It compared Trump’s verbal stylings to Shakespeare, William Faulkner, and James Joyce. Seriously. [2]
Just two months ago, the press took a very different attitude towards the mental processes of an aging candidate. On July 11, President Biden held a news conference to talk about the recently concluded NATO summit. He was asked questions on a variety of foreign-policy topics and answered them all in considerable detail, demonstrating an impressive mastery of a number of complex situations. Reuters’ headline captured none of that, because Biden had also occasionally misnamed people, like saying “Putin” when he meant “Zelensky”. “Biden makes a series of verbal gaffes at NATO summit“. The Hill also found Biden’s flub newsworthy: “Zelensky dismissed Biden accidentally calling him Putin as a ‘mistake’“.
If Biden made a verbal error, that became the headline. It eclipsed whatever else he had been trying to say.
Why isn’t Trump being covered the same way? When Trump says something insane or incoherent that should be the news. It’s not just smoke that a reporter needs to blow away to reveal some underlying policy point that may or may not actually exist. The nominee of a major party regularly says things that are insane or incoherent. That’s what’s significant. That — and not whatever policy a reporter can interpret from his ravings — is the news in these Trump events.
Blogs like this one have been making this point for months. But that understanding is beginning to creep closer to the mainstream. It is being aided by the existence of a term that perfectly describes what the NYT and its ilk have been doing: sanewashing.
Apparently the term goes back at least to 2020 and has been popularized more recently by Aaron Rupar, whose X/Twitter feed I often quote. But I hadn’t noticed sanewashing until this week, when suddenly it exploded into public consciousness and usage. TNR’s Parker Malloy defines it like this: “reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse”. Her article gives many examples I have not mentioned here.
Her TNR colleague Michael Tomasky was a little more blunt:
With dizzying regularity, Trump lies. He says toxic, antidemocratic things over and over again. And he still gets treated like a normal candidate. It’s often the case that the media, presented with another one of his addled rants, will dive in, scoop, and separate enough words to make it seem like he’s got enough actual gray matter gooping around in his skull to form a complete sentence, and present their director’s cut of his wandering mind for public consumption.
His link is to a Jason Linkin tweet, which calls this phenomenon “coherency bias”. But sanewash is the term that seems to be winning out. Thursday, James Fallows asked his followers on X/Twitter whether they can
think of an example of main media “sane-washing” Biden the way they are even today doing w Trump?
Friday, the term appeared in the Outside the Beltway blog. Friday, Joy Reid used it on MSNBC. This morning, it appeared in Columbia Journalism Review.
A phenomenon with a widely-used name is harder to ignore, and harder to make excuses for, than some vague intuition that a lot of us share. Perhaps now we can hope that Trump’s delusions and incoherent rambles will themselves become news, just as Biden’s word-substitutions did.
Greg Sargent, who wrote The Plum Line blog for the WaPo until 2023 and now writes for TNR, described what that would mean:
Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness. Real journalistic resources should be put into meaningfully covering it from multiple angles, as often happens with other big national stories of great consequence.
He illustrated the point by rewriting actual headlines about Biden as they might apply Trump.
- Behind closed doors, Trump shows signs of slipping
- Why the dishonesty issue hurts Trump so much more than Harris
- A claim about transgender Americans puts Trump’s relentless lying back at the center of 2024
- Trump’s penchant for unintelligible rambling back in spotlight after verbal tirades
- Erratic rants at rallies aren’t just theatrics. They’re a profound and growing problem for Trump.
- Trump’s delusions seen as accelerating; lapses described as more common
- Republicans bungle Trump misogyny concerns, some critics say
- Trump campaign again forced into damage control to dispel concerns about his abusiveness and incoherence
- Trump dismisses questions about mental soundness in interview as he tries to salvage election effort
- Trump at 78: Forceful and aggressive, but sometimes confused and addled
And he asks:
Are these headlines really stretches, based on all we’ve seen? I submit that they are not. Note that all of these treat signs of the subject’s questionable mental fitness for the presidency—and the politics surrounding them—as themselves being the real news. How often do you see headlines like this? Why don’t we see more of them?
Why indeed?
[1] It’s worth pointing out that even if you give Trump the benefit of the doubt and interpret his nonsense as having something to do with tariffs, he still isn’t making sense. A tariff does not “tax foreign nations”. A tariff is a tax paid by an American importer, not a foreign exporter. If that importer isn’t going to go broke, it needs to raise the prices its American customers pay. So a tariff is ultimately a tax on American consumers, not on foreigners.
This has been well understood for a long time. Back in 1828, a tariff very nearly started the Civil War decades early, because it taxed British goods Southerners needed in order to benefit Northern industries that otherwise couldn’t compete with British imports. Southerners like John Calhoun labeled the proposal “the Tariff of Abominations“, because they grasped that the British weren’t paying the tax, they were.
So calling a tariff a “tax on foreign nations”, like talking about schools performing surgeries on unsuspecting students, is delusional.
[2] I am reminded of a possibly apocryphal story (recounted without reference in the Illuminatus! trilogy) of a conversation between James Joyce and Carl Jung. Joyce excuses his schizophrenic daughter’s ravings by comparing them to similar to passages in his own writing. “You are diving,” Jung supposedly replies, “but she is sinking.”
When Trump “weaves”, I don’t think he’s diving.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Historians will, for decades, be asking the question you raise: Why has the American press abandoned its duties to the benefit of someone who believes it shouldn’t exist in the first place?
Corporations are all the same, whether they sell oil or news. They all love Trump.
Two thoughts:
First, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to see a relationship between sanewashing and the even polling of Harris and Trump. IOW, sanewashing is a powerful thumb on the scales wtih enormous potential consequences for the country.
Second, we learned far later than we should have the malign and concrete impact of death threats on Republican senators’ votes on impeachment. Looking at their resolute refusal to change their sanewashing ways or even to acknowledge the criticism, how confident can we be that this is not a factor — conceivably a decisive factor — in press coverage of this campaign?
Peter Olson Portland OR
>
Many of Trump’s comments are strangely “empathic” in that they resonate with many voters’ obsessions (home invasions, programming and taking our kids, tax ripoffs a la ‘Welfare Queens’…). I’ve run into this form of thinking when canvassing. This by no means excuses his inane remarks though I wonder if they explain some of his appeal.
Corporate oligarchs own the MSM; the oligarchs love not Trump but the people that would would populate the government in a reign of Trump.
Contrary to what many seem to think, journalism is not about presenting both sides. Journalism is obligated to report the truth.
I stopped to listen to that NYT piece about the Mom’s for Liberty… rally. It brought to mind the women who came out of their male dominated autocratic homes and relationships (albeit blessed by their masters) to undermine the ERA.
I have conservatives in my social media network who agree with me that actions speak louder than words. I hear this in the ignoring of his misogynistic rants. They don’t seem to acknowledge the repeated statements as representing action. And at risk, I’ll go so far as to say that they live in that world, possibly by choice, for the power of association it provides them.
This continues without abatement from the NYT, WAPO and others. Why? They’ve been called out – especially the NYT, and lost subscribers because of it. What gives?
Charlies Pierce of Esquire is my go-to jump-all-over it guy, although he can be succinct to the point of leaving me dragging my tongue on the floor wishing he’d write a bit more (his Saturday history columns slake my thirst).
What gives is that they are betting the educated, sane, emotionally healthy adults will conclude they have nowhere else to go while they chase the alt-reality MAGA base. They’ve seen how much money Faux Noise makes pandering to this crowd and whipping their unregulated emotions into a froth and they want in on the action.
They also believe and fear a Trump administration will bring the power of government to bear on its enemies, and so are yet another example of successfully working the refs.
Finally, they are selling a horse race. If one of the horses is an old, broken-down ass with bone spurs who constantly whines to itself in its stall and is clearly only qualified for the glue factory, what kind of product do they have to sell? This is why earnest, good-faith candidates who speak and act in a manner consistent with emotionally healthy adults are criticized while arrested-development emotional adolescents who only have outrageousness and lies to offer are excused. No one’s going to buy/follow/click a daily menu of “Trump’s obviously a lying con-man in the middle stages of dementia who belongs in prison” stories, even though those would be pretty much only what a responsible fourth estate would write.
Ken Pelo
Sent from my iPad
A few weeks ago, Robert Evans’ Behind the Bastards podcast had a series on how the liberal (not conservative) media facilitated the rise of fascism. During World War Two, New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger allowed only six articles on the Holocaust, in an effort to appear “balanced” and avoid giving the impression that the paper had a “Jewish” bias, potentially affecting Sulzberger’s social life. More recently, Maggie Haberman revealed that she was privy to discussions leading up to the January 6 riot, which she didn’t disclose to law enforcement as this might have affected the access she enjoyed while she worked on her book about the Trump presidency.
Right now, we’re seeing the change in CNN’s reporting as they attempt their own version of “balance.” The problem, which should be obvious to us, and will undoubtedly be obvious to future generations, is that any balance in discussing Trump is inappropriate. We don’t have two candidates who mainly differ in their approach to governance. We have a contest where one nominee may be certifiably insane.
One theory I haven’t heard discussed is that once Trump is sworn in, he could be removed under the 25th Amendment, allowing Vance to take over as the puppet of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the Heritage Foundation. All they need Trump for is to win the election; once he accomplishes that, his ego and incompetence will only be an obstacle, so they won’t hesitate to dispose of him after that.
Yes, the Vance takeover scenario is a vary scary possibility to me as well
As a foreigner (an Australian with many American friends and who used to visit regularly – and not just the coasts), it’s a complete mystery to me why papers that consider themselves journals of record do this. Is it groupthink among the journalists, or editorial policy? Or…? And, unlike Australia, it’s not just the Murdoch propaganda machine doing this.
Indeed! Murdoch and Ailes played a large role in starting the machine that has now metastasized throughout marketed news media.
Sanewashing has been going on since at least the Trump presidency, if not even before it. Take, for instance, the refusal of the press to reject the crowd-size claims for his inauguration. Instead, it became of battle of whether one would defy the official version of reality from the WH for what the actual reality was and risk access, and the desire not to risk access won.
When Trump suggested injecting bleach to treat Covid, who stood up and demanded – to his face – that his insanity stop? Over and over and over again, Trump and his spokespuppets blatantly lied, and everyone knew it, and the media refused to say “No more!”, but instead let the standard playbook of rolling right over them unfold.
Trump’s physical and mental decline were obvious even while he was in office. For instance, his posture as he stands and his dragging of his right leg, or his need to lift a bottle of water to his mouth using both hands. And clearly, his onset of dementia has only become more pronounced since then. He confuses Nimrata Haley with Nancy Pelosi, makes up events that never happened involving people he wasn’t with, and repeatedly forgets people’s names, all the while having a very gentle travel and appearance schedule.
In the meantime, Joe Biden is flying around the world working his ass off to build and maintain a variety of alliances and then is crucified by the media when he fails to be as eloquent as Obama and as sharp as Aaron Sorkin’s Jed Bartlet. And now, when the choice is between an obviously highly capable, high-energy adult in the intellectual prime of her life and a seditious criminal on the verge of complete mental and physical collapse, leaving JD Vance, of all people, to take over, the mainstream media insists on treating these two options as equally viable and worthy of consideration. And not on the basis of underlying considerations, such as the future of the SCOTUS, but on the basis of the two people themselves.
Even the term “sanewashing” doesn’t adequately capture the complete abdication by most of our national media to accurately inform our body politic of the factual reality of what is going on. It’s markedly more perverse than that, and once Trump is either in prison or a Putin-provided dacha, the next item to be addressed in this country is the responsibility they have for it.
Since at least the ’80s the republicans have been training the media to coddle them like moody toddlers. Don’t like reporting of your unpopular policies? Throw a tantrum claiming the left-wing media is not fair to your ideas. Blame partisanship when social media accounts that happen to be right-wing are banned because they were spreading dangerous misinformation. Build on all of that by labelling the press as enemies of the people until they quite rationally begin to fear for their lives if they offend the sensibilities of MAGA supporters.
It isn’t journalistic integrity we need, it’s courage in the face of threats — threat of verbal attack from a psychotic, paper tiger candidate, and threat of physical attack from his supporters. This is where we can support any reporters with the courage to report the truth.
Trump also spoke about NATO members needing to “pay up”, and he did not get called out on how deceptive that is. All NATO member countries pay into the NATO operating fund, none are delinquent. Other than that they are mostly spending on their own militaries. Currently, 23 of 32 NATO members spend the minimum guideline of 2% of GDP, but that can’t be called “payment”.
The kernel of truth is that some NATO members (and a few non-NATO) do pay the U.S. to operates bases in their territory as part of their commitment. If you think of that as a business, then getting paid about 34% of what we spend seems wrong. But one expert points out that if we pulled in all the people from those bases we would just be losing money (unless there is an equivalent force reduction).
Fact check: Debunking five false Trump claims about NATO
What the U.S. Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad
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