The term sanewashing has entered the terminology of the US presidential race, and not before time. A portmanteau of “sane” and “whitewashing”, it describes what many news outlets have been doing for years when presented with a wodge of Donald Trump’s gibberish.
They can’t ignore the deranged, depraved word salad since he is a presidential candidate and they can’t or won’t reprint every exhausting, demented remark. So they repackage say, the 12,000 words delivered in his Republican convention speech (as opposed to the 3,000 in the prepared script) in snappier and coherent language, telling us what they think he meant to say rather than what he actually said. But here’s the problem: in the heavily sanitised repackaging, the sheer ignorant madness of the gibberish is played down, making him sound sane and rational in a way that denies reality.
Over the weekend, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman used the term in relation to Trump’s crazy threat to impose 100 per cent tariffs on countries that don’t use the dollar, noting that so far, aside from Bloomberg, major media doesn’t seem to have picked up on it. “So before the sanewashing begins, here’s what he said in context…” said Krugman, striving to pre-empt the inevitable attempts to polish another Trump turd. To this non-economist, the single fact that Trump thinks that tariffs are “taxes” on foreign countries that would somehow protect the US economy, finance childcare and cost US consumers nothing should be in two-foot headlines.
Such journalism either assumes Trump’s deranged thinking is already factored in by readers – or that a presidential nominee can’t possibly be this bonkers
Last Saturday, he told a Wisconsin crowd how their children might arrive home with transition-related surgery on a schoolday: “Can you imagine you’re a parent, and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school’ and son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” It’s not imaginable simply because it never happened. At the same rally, he talked about his plan for “mass deportation” of border-crossers – “And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story.” In a sane and rational world, attendees would have begun to talk excitedly among themselves, plotting the location of Jimmy’s schoolteachers, or what exactly Trump meant by “bloody story”. No major media outlet gave the Jimmy story front-page treatment. The Reuters headline over the rally report read: “Trump Revs Up Small-Town Base in Wisconsin”. That’s sanewashing.
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A week beforehand, he had told the same “goes to school, comes home with surgery” story at a Moms for Liberty convention in Washington DC, where the moderator talked about an “explosion” of trans children existing in the United States, and Trump said that children were undergoing gender-affirming surgeries in school: “Think of it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” The New York Times report rightly interrogated his misogyny but failed to mention the outlandish trans school surgeries claim. The NYT headline? “Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny”. That’s sanewashing. Such journalism either assumes that Trump’s deranged thinking is already factored in by readers and is fully normalised – or that a presidential nominee can’t possibly be this bonkers so his words must be continually polished or omitted altogether. Either way the disconnect between framing and reality is dangerous. Not the least of it is that he repeats the conspiracy lie again and again.
A piece in the New Republic recalls a visit by then president Trump to the Centres for Disease Control in 2020 when he used the occasion to ask about Fox News’s ratings, insult the Washington governor, rant about his attempt to extort Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and – not least – downplay the rising Covid-19 numbers. The NYT’s headline on that? “Trump Says ‘People Have to Remain Calm’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak”. He did say that. To the vast numbers who hadn’t witnessed the live rant, the president would have sounded reassuringly sane and focused. But would anyone at the Centres for Disease Control that day believe it was anything like a true and fair reflection of what actually happened? Recall that his stewardship of Covid eventually led to tens of thousands of American deaths, not to mention the knock-on effect on his faithful imitators here and around the world.
There are signs that plainer language is being used in US media. On Monday, separate NYT headlines said baldly that Trump faces questions about his age and capacity – “sometimes he makes false claims that are so far-fetched, they make him appear detached from reality” – and how his campaign repeated a false claim that Haitian immigrants had stolen and eaten pets. It cited his senseless, rambling response to the childcare question, stating that “often his mangled statements are summarised in news accounts in ways that do not give the full picture of how baffling they can be. Quoting them at length, though, can provide additional context”. And it went on to quote his full daft reply on childcare. As opposition politicians are too fond of saying, it’s too little too late. But it’s something. It won’t move his base but the undecideds may start to read a little deeper.