Sanewashing Trump Redux
Why press coverage of the former and possibly future President doesn't match the reality.
Columbia Journalism Review columnist Jon Allsop extends a recent conversation here, asking “Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump?” His answer resonates with me. After several paragraphs recapping the debate thus far, he weighs in:
As I see it, newsroom policies discouraging remote diagnoses of mental health are generally to be followed, even if they shouldn’t curb any and all discussion in this area; also, Trump does have (or at least is associated with) policies that merit scrutiny, however incoherently he articulates them, and—as even some critics acknowledge—there has been at least some sharp recent coverage centering the incoherence. The idea that “the media” as a whole has ignored Trump’s fitness for office is very hard to sustain.
I interrupt him mid-paragraph for emphasis. This is a point I’ve been making for going on nine years now: whatever the failings of the mainstream press in failing to adjust longstanding journalistic norms to deal with a decidedly abnormal candidate/President, it has been abundantly clear since well before Trump secured the 2016 Republican nomination that he was spouting racist, misogynistic, nonsensical rhetoric. While I do think his verbal performance has noticeably declined over the intervening period, this has been very clear to me despite hardly watching any of his speeches.
Nonetheless, I find the sanewashing criticism persuasive, on the whole. Too often, major outlets clean up Trump’s language—especially in shorter formats, like headlines and ledes—to the point where it barely resembles what he actually said. And, if the press hasn’t ignored Trump’s fitness, [TNR’s Greg] Sargent made a compelling case, in his column, that it hasn’t subjected his age and condition to anything like the level of focused scrutiny that was applied to President Biden on such grounds. (Sargent deftly illustrated this by swapping Trump’s name into real headlines about Biden.) As I wrote after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, Trump was incoherent that night, too, but seemed to get away with it because he showed more energy.
That debate was one of the rare campaign event I watched in real time and, frankly, I think the press got it right. Yes, Trump spouted a Gish Gallop of nonsense all night. But, rather obviously, Biden’s WTF performance was the story of the evening. It wasn’t just the FTFNYT that made that judgment: Nancy Pelosi and pretty much the entirety of the Democratic Party Establishment read the tea leaves and pushed Biden to the side.
If journalists are sometimes sanewashing Trump, why are they doing it? Critics including [Parker] Molloy and [Mike] Barnicle have suggested that it has something to do with that old desire to project a false equivalence, or “balance,” between the two leading candidates. [Jeffrey] Goldberg blamed a “bias toward coherence,” whereby Trump benefits from journalists’ classic conception of their role as being to make sense of the world around them. (“It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party,” Goldberg wrote.) There are other possible explanations. Could it be that elite journalists think so little of Trump that they effectively condescend to him by cleaning up his speech? Do they think that picking meaning out of his word salads makes them sound clever or original? Is he held to a lower standard than his opponents because the latter are expected to speak in full sentences and he never has been? Is Trump sounding incoherent simply old news at this point, in an industry that prizes novelty?
As regular readers are aware, I’m strongly in favor of the last of these explanations. Trump being Trump isn’t news. Additionally, it’s longstanding journalistic practice to try to explain things to readers rather than make them wade through the speeches for themselves to figure it out. If the reporters understand what Trump is trying to say, they’re naturally going to translate it into coherent English for the reader. (They’ve long done the same for Biden, by the way.)
Whichever it is—and all these explanations could, theoretically, be in play at the same time—it’s worth noting that the sanewashing phenomenon figures into a debate that is almost as old as Trump’s political career itself, and legitimately thorny: whether to expose news consumers more to his rhetoric, or shut it out. Proponents of the former approach have argued that broadcasting Trump’s rallies live, for example, offers an unvarnished window onto his incoherence; proponents of the latter have argued that the first approach exposes audiences to unchecked lies and gives Trump free airtime. I wrote about this debate earlier in the year and concluded that it has been so circular because there isn’t really a satisfying answer—it felt true to me that many people have become desensitized to how Trump talks, but also that journalists cannot expect people to consume streams of raw information all the time.
There really is no right answer here. Again, though, my longstanding view on this is that reporters should treat Trump like they would any other major party nominee/President. Like it or not, his speeches and rallies were newsworthy precisely because they were so out of the ordinary. But, after awhile, their weirdness became background noise, barely rating a mention.
The biggest problem, I concluded, was not journalists’ failure to resolve an unresolvable debate about exposure, but their failure to accurately describe Trump’s rhetoric—without resorting to euphemism, for example—and to do so with due prominence. The sanewashing critique speaks to this same problem, at least in part. When I wrote earlier this year, it was in the context of Trump saying, at a rally, that his failure to win reelection would lead to a “bloodbath in the country”—remarks, many critics suggested, that were subsequently sanewashed by allies and pundits who suggested that he was talking metaphorically about the auto industry. I argued at the time that the furor over the phrase missed the point: Trump said many unambiguously dangerous things at the same rally that got far less attention. This problem is still with us, and it still involves blood. Over the weekend, Trump said (again at a rally) that removing immigrant gangs from the US would be a “bloody story”—remarks that got media coverage, but not as much as they merited given their implications. Ditto an explicit Trump pledge to prosecute those he believes “cheated” in the coming election. (Last night, an Axios newsletter mentioned this threat in its last lines, having opened with “dueling tax-cut promises” by Harris and Trump that amount to “each candidate trying to make Election Day feel like Christmas morning.”) If sanewashing the incoherent things Trump says is a problem, then so is failing to proportionately cover his all-too-coherent threats.
Here, though, I’m fully in agreement with Allsop that the press coverage has been inadequate. Trump’s authoritarian—and increasingly violent—rhetoric should not be normalized. It might be baked in at this point, in that anyone who still supports Trump now has managed to rationalize it, but it’s so out of the ordinary—and dangerous—that it merits vigilant coverage. Not-so-cryptic threats of bloodbaths should make headlines each and every time they’re made.
To whatever extent journalists show people Trump’s unadulterated speech, it will always be part of our job to describe it. At root, the critics of sanewashing are really just asking the media to “report accurately on what we’re all seeing in front of us,” as Fattal put it in The Atlantic. Sections of the media, not least those from which the critics hail, are doing this already; if major outlets aren’t always doing likewise, the fact that they do it sometimes shows that accurate descriptions of violent and incoherent rhetoric are communicable within the existing linguistic and reportorial codes of elite media. (The Atlantic is a highly elite publication, and seems to have little problem clearly describing the things Trump says.)
But The Atlantic isn’t a news magazine. It’s entire remit is analysis, opinion, and feature writing. It’s just a different animal than the NYT, WaPo, or CNN.
Tomorrow night, viewers will get an unadulterated dose of Trump when they tune in for his debate against Harris on ABC. Well, somewhat adulterated; Harris will be there too, of course, and Trump’s mic will be muted when she is talking—to the frustration of Harris’s team, which wanted her to be able to grill Trump in real time and also reportedly saw benefit in letting viewers hear Trump acting out. Ironically, it was Biden—who agreed to the terms for the debate before dropping out—who demanded muted mics; even Trump’s opponents, it seems, can’t agree on whether it’s best to shut him up or let him be heard. Unlike at the Biden-Trump debate in June, a “pool” of journalists will reportedly be close enough to the stage to hear the candidates this time. It might end up being their job to tell us what Trump said off-mic. Unavoidably, it’ll be all our jobs to describe what Trump said with the mics on.
Given that Harris is unlikely to be incoherently rambling and staring off into space during the telecast, it’s quite likely that the story will be one of contrasts. Whether that will be comparative zingers, Trump’s behavior, or what remains to be seen. I will tune in to watch it for myself.
The actual work of the media has very little ability to deal with power. If someone in power says it’s okay to do x or y, then what’s the problem? You could make the same argument about concentration camps set up to do away with migrants. At first, it’s newsworthy. Then it’s regrettable background noise because people above us said it’s okay. It’s only an event if the camps are ‘exposed’ or done away with. And the same argument has been made with powerful people like Harvey Weinstein. It was background noise that he was a rapist until he was ‘exposed’ and then it was news. And this is why the media focuses on college protestors rather than the thugs who attack them while the police look on. They have no power.
Trump isn’t all that powerful as a person, but he’s exploiting the mechanism in place in America where people do what they’re told.
That was a common explanation for NYT, Trump’s hometown paper, failing in 2016 to cover Trump’s known and rumored criminality. At what point were these things well covered as new news?
That “sanewashing” is now a meme is a big step forward. Perhaps media recognizing their collective failure is indeed new news worth some coverage.
It might be. That quote addressed the violence in Trump’s rhetoric, but let me broaden the point to his incoherence. The average American pays little attention to political news, and MAGA mostly pay attention only to FOX et al. They haven’t so much rationalized it, as they are able, with FOX’s help, to ignore it.
I get the argument that reporters may be trying to explain what Trump means, or what they think he means. I also understand that the “weave” produces rambling sentences which may be too long to fit in an article. But I have seen too many articles where the cleanup is occurring inside quotation marks. That to me is just plain lying even if the article is trying to make his speech more sound more intelligible. If you are quoting someone it needs to be what they actually said.
You could watch the convention speeches on youtube the next day, or a week or two later. I assume the debate will be available to watch or rewatch the next day likewise. So if there is anything the news media call attention to lots of people will be able to see for themselves without needing to watch the debate in real time as it occurs.
@charontwo: Yes, true. Convention speeches are written by someone else, so not particularly useful in my analysis. Debates are often serial press conferences but, with Trump, they’re potentially game changers since he’s so unconstrained.
Sanewashing is part of it, but equally corrosive is that reporters pretend to treat his statements seriously but then do not in any way take them seriously. By that I mean they don’t discuss them and their repercussions, but just clean them up, report that washed version, and move on. There is no better example than his recent meandering on child care. I’ve heard and read the entire thing a number of times and the only thing he says clearly is that we will collect so much in tariffs that we can easily afford childcare. But the “we” in collecting tariffs is the US government. I can’t read this section as anything other than this administration is going to institute universal childcare. If he doesn’t mean that, he would need to explain how the tariff money is going to make it into the hands of the childcare providers. But the media has not asked any follow up, because they don’t take anything he says seriously.
@MarkedMan: And, of course, as your post reminds me (and I don’t mean to pick on you), Trump isn’t serious about anything he says. Not that it’s a joke, mind you, it’s just rambling nonsense that is the first thing that comes to his lazy, ignorant mind and has little actual relation to his beliefs or possible future policies. In other words, the words he says don’t even matter. We all know this by now, but it’s a level of such incredible craziness in a serious presidential candidate that I can’t imagine how it can be addressed in daily news articles.
As a person who has had a boatload of experience with people who have a variety of mental illness, I am here to tell you that the frame of “mental illness” does not cover why Trump should not be president.
I think Trump’s authoritarianism, which has nothing to do with mental illness, is a much bigger problem than any sort of public rambling he does. In the job, people can ask him clarifying questions. Most of the down to the minute stuff will be delegated anyway.
Also, Trump’s constant lying is a problem just because of the frequency of it. However, some fairly effective presidents lied their asses off. (James K. Polk, I’m looking at you.)
No, the true disqualifier with Trump was that he attempted to reverse the outcome of a legally conducted election.
Also, he stole documents from the government, stored them in highly insecure locations, showed them to other people, lied about whether he had them, and transported some to a different location to prevent the government from recovering them.
Also, he has as his running mate a guy who says that a woman who doesn’t have children is second-class.
Again, that might be enabled by a narcissistic streak, but I reject the notion that it was caused by narcissism. Lots of people have narcissism who don’t do crap like that. Mentally disabled persons (as long as they have their grip on reality, which most, including Trump, do) make moral choices, and have moral habits just like everyone else. See “A Beautiful Mind” for instance.
Trump’s “sanity” is not the issue. It’s his choices that are the issue.
Yeah, I get the desire for payback over Biden, and the unequal treatment. I’m on record as thinking Biden could still do the job, but you know what they say: Perception *is* reality.
The debate was like watching two people at an old age home arguing where one was suffering from dementia and the other had taken too much medicine. And that’s how it should have been reported: a tragedy all around, what the fuck America?
Instead, the press decided to see if they could destroy the candidacy of just one of them, repeating themselves and creating a long lasting story until Democrats pushed Biden out.
And on the topic of sane-washing, it would be reasonable to report “Trump rambled incoherently and spouted falsehoods suggesting that he was going to resort to violence: ‘[insert long rambling quote]’. X, Y and Z are false conspiracy theories shared widely on the right.” Viola, story inches and blobs of content, ready to create a framework to hold advertisements.
——
What does FTFNYT stand for? I’ve always read it as “Fuck The Fucking NYTimes,” and have never seen it used where that meaning was out of place, but I suspect that’s not it.
@MarkedMan:
The media doesn’t just give Trump this huge advantage, they give it to the whole of the Republican Party with great regularity.
When Trump was last in office, they didn’t Repeal/Replace the ACA in part because neither Trump nor GOP politicians could articulate a replacement for the health insurance affordability the public clearly wants. They didn’t Build the Wall because getting Mexico pay for it was a fantasy and ~2000 miles of insurmountable wall is a monumental engineering task. Pithy slogans don’t lead to legislation.
Now they’re talking about mass deportation, tariffs, and Drill Baby Drill, but not being asked about the societal disruption, impacts to inflation, or the reality that oil production in the US is already very high. Also, the Republicans have found a way to circumvent the difficulties of creating legislation with the Project 2025 playbook for authoritarianism and party leaders are allowed to dance away from that relatively easily.
@Gustopher:
That’s it. They’re schizoid. NYT, the “paper of record”, does stuff like the 1619 Project, and today’s Editorial Board A Clear Choice on the Issue Voters Care About Most (the “high cost of living”). FTFNYT does thinks like obsess about Hillary’s email, note at every opportunity that Biden is 81, sanewash Trump’s remarks, and, in the gift linked column, fail to note that relative to income, the cost of living is not high.
@Gustopher:
Though it felt like it at the time, in retrospect I think this gives the press too much credit. The mainstream press’ biases (incentivized to generate clicks) are dramatic stories and easy to tell narratives, so the Biden is Old and It Really Showed stories wrote themselves after the debate.
But the “long lasting story” came from the Democrats responding to this evidence (and the polling of their constituents at the time) with unexpected political savvy, unprecedented mature leadership from Biden, and deft/speedy management of the transition to Harris. I actually think the media has done a good job telling the positive story of Democrats agency in this instance. I also believe the shift in polling and the record fundraising bear out that this storyline has resonated with the electorate.
On the other hand, Trump spouted nonsense through the whole debate and the Republicans responded by doubling down, because they are afraid of their constituents and the Trumpkins ate that Gish Gallop up. Trump has only gotten worse since then, but the GOP mouthpieces on TV are allowed to explain it away. The rank cowardice of an entire major party is taken as normal and justifiable even in the face of a wannabe dictator and his Trumpist mob. Ex-Republicans like Kinzinger, Luttig, and the Cheney’s (as well as Taylor and Joyner) see their way to putting country over party, but Nikki Haley, Lindsey Graham, and Chris Sununu maintain their standing as decent Republicans rather than being doggedly called out for bending the knee.
I still contend that the biggest threat being normalized right now isn’t Trump himself, but pro-Trump Republicanism. In a sane world, with reality-based news coverage of the implications of the kind of government we have, a democracy loving electorate would reject minority rule. Instead, the GOP persists, and even thrives, despite its cowardice, cruelty, dysfunction, and (if we’re even slightly discerning) complete lack of pragmatic policy (see my comment above).
So, the Story of the Times is that the US isn’t a democracy loving electorate or the implications of authoritarianism aren’t being properly debated.
The sane-washing of Trump, and the previous “he should be taken seriously, but not literally” reminds me of the 2015 German film Look Who’s Back.
Hitler wakes up in 2014 in a park where his bunker was, and most people think he is a charming man with a mildly concerning bit of performance art that they are willing to overlook. Promoted by an unemployed film-maker, he gets into politics.
Throughout a small number of people recognize him for what he is, but by and large they are dismissed as reading too much into things, etc.
It’s a very dark, very funny film about not seeing the obvious danger right in front of you.
@James Joyner:
Some points:
Reporters should definitely not be sanewashing or translating Trump’s remarks into normal coherent English, no dumbing down ‘what he was saying’ cowering and groveling. If his remarks are unfiltered, then report them as such – unfiltered.
So, yes, it (Trump’s violent rhetoric) should not be normalized, but it has been normalized. As you said, it’s baked in.
His supporters … do … not … care. They believe that the country is off track and that Trump will fight to make the big changes they want. They just don’t happen to believe that any of those radical changes will affect them, it will only come at the expense of ‘libs’ and ‘libtards.’
@Scott F.:
Put another way, the media will run more of the stories that people are clicking on, and less of the stories that get little notice.
@al Ameda:
Alas, *I could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and no one would care* **plays a role in why this problem exists. Sadly, we are a nation in which people being shot on 5th Avenue–or anywhere else for that matter–is greeted with forelock tugging and mumbles about “thoughts and prayers.”
** Asterisks used to mark alleged Trump statement because I no longer remember the exact quote, assuming I ever heard it at all.
@Scott F.:
I remember Howard Dean being destroyed by a scream because the media decided that “the man is unhinged” would be the narrative. (Specifically Fox, in that case, replaying it and providing commentary to make people think he was unhinged rather than playing to the crowd with a microphone too close to his face — and then the rest of the media picking that up and “reporting on the controversy” incessantly)
“Elder abuse all around: how did we come to this?” would have also been a dramatic, easy to tell narrative that would get clicks. They chose which narrative to go with.
@Gustopher:
To be clear, I’m not saying the press doesn’t have agency or that the media didn’t choose to make a thing of Biden’s age while not making a thing out of Trump’s belligerence, mendacity, and incoherence. I just think making it all about Trump is missing the forest for the trees.
My key point is that I don’t believe Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats who worked Joe Biden past his reluctance were cowed into action by the press. I don’t think Biden was ultimately swayed by his press coverage either. These leaders, as leaders of a healthy political party ought, saw the prevailing storylines and read the polling, then took action that changed the dynamics of the election in positive ways. Conversely, no amount of bad press and stagnant poll numbers have moved the Republicans to take any action to mitigate Trumpism. Instead, the GOP is working on ways to screw with the vote counting.
So, we have one major party that has managed its coalition partners in a way that is responsive to its various factions and that is based in reality. We have another major party that has let its most deplorable faction take over and that is based on telling their base that they are right to feel aggrieved and oppressed, plus it’s the Other Guys’ fault.
Yet, this most important political story is being largely untold due to the press & punditry’s tendency toward both-siderism and a misguided understanding of fairness in reporting.
Was it news in 2015-2016? Trump sounded like an incoherent loon all throughout that campaign, as well as colluding with Russia. But the media let him off the hook for both back then, while screaming Hillary’s emails Hillary’s emails Hillary’s emails Hillary’s emails at us everyday.
The excuse they can’t properly hold Trump to account in 2024 because it’s not news *anymore* doesn’t work because they’ve never done so. The corporate media that is dominated by whites and owned by rich white men smeared Biden and Hillary while letting Trump off the hook for the same reasons a majority of white and especially rich white male voters do: they’re biased against Democrats, and they continually fall for fake rightwing propaganda (“Tyreek Hill was going 100mph!” is this week’s example).
Sometimes a cigar is a just cigar.
@al Ameda: “So, yes, it (Trump’s violent rhetoric) should not be normalized, but it has been normalized. As you said, it’s baked in. ”
And the bakers are the MSM. When you repeatedly say that/act like it just doesn’t matter, you are sending a message.
When you turn ‘savage assault’ into ‘an altercation’ (hypothetically), you are taking a side and sending a message. This it propaganda, pure and simple.
@gVOR10:
*crickets*
CNN only calls the Haitians-are-eating-pets baseless smear a “rumor” for one reason. They want Trump to win.
It’s never happened. It’s a flat-out lie.
And the reason the reporters do not call it a lie is because…. the people independent enough to call it a lie will not get hired by CNN. CNN, because it’s owned by a Republican, is in the business of Being Just Neutral Enough For Liberals To Purchase But Always Excusing And Promoting Republicans.
Rinse and repeat with WaPo, NYT, Tribune, etc. Newspapers are conservative corporations and should be thought of [and treated] accordingly…. because the newspapers gave up their objectivity years ago. Remember of course that the “newspapers are liberal” item is just Republican propaganda from decades ago, intended to browbeat them before they were lockstep conservative.
I suspect they’ve never been neutral and that it’s always been yellow journalism time.