There’s a new word making the rounds. I don’t know who coined it, but I like it:
Sanewashing.
That perfectly describes the mainstream media’s ongoing impulse to sanitize Donald Trump’s batshittery, to clean up his imbecilic verbal droppings – in essence, to pretend that he’s just like any other presidential candidate and to thus mislead the electorate, dangerously so. Sanewashing is a great synonym for what I call dung duty.
The examples of late are too numerous to list, so I’ll just cite the most recent. It came yesterday, when Trump auditioned in front of some business leaders in New York City. At one point he was asked whether he would prioritize specific legislation to make childcare affordable, and, if so, what specific legislative provisions he would support. I will now share the first half of the stable genius’ riffed response, verbatim:
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, and I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, 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 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 gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Uh, those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”
A few observations:
(1) He sounds like a 12-year-old on meds who’s been summoned to the front of the class to give an oral book report about a book he never opened.
(2) If Kamala Harris talked that way, there would be multiple stories, columns, and editorials attesting to her incoherence and questioning her candidate credentials.
And (3) He said we don’t need childcare legislation at all, because he’ll pay for it by “taxing foreign nations at levels they’re not used to.” He was referencing his bright idea of slapping tariffs on foreign goods; in reality, the foreign nations would simply pass those costs to American consumers in the form of higher prices. In other words, Trump would essentially tax middle-class consumers who need affordable childcare in order to raise the money to pay for their childcare.
So anyway, take a wild guess what The New York Times did with that slab of verbatim babble.
You guessed correctly: Nothing.
Way deep down in its story yesterday – the 24th paragraph – it sanewashed the guy this way: “Mr. Trump said he would commit to legislation but did not offer any specifics, insisting that his other economic policies, including tariffs, would ‘take care’ of child care. ‘As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”
Way to cherry pick! You’d never know, from that passage, that the aging convicted criminal is cognitively impaired. (And, by the way, Trump in his verbatim response did not commit to any chlldcare legislation.)
Even worse is when the MSM sanitizes Trump with total erasure. Last Saturday, for instance, when Trump stumped in front of a right-wing group called Moms for Liberty, he offered this beaut:
“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?’”
But when The Times wrote up its report on his appearance – the headline says that he “charmed” the ladies – that toxic stew of insane conspiracy and outright falsity was nowhere to be found. You need to dig down to the 15th paragraph to even find the word transgender, but this was all it said: “There is a reason Mr. Trump mentions the issue of transgender athletes at pretty much every rally he speaks at – it is a powerful, motivating one for many parents, and he knows it.”
Why does the mainstream media (The Times is the most prominent practitioner) keep laundering Trump’s insanity and incoherence? Why does it keep showing up for dung duty? Has it still learned nothing since 2016?
My best guess – speaking as an alum who spent several decades on the campaign trail – is that the MSM, a slave to archaic “both-sides objectivity,” still has no clue how to cover a uniquely asymmetric campaign that pits a normal person with normal pro-democracy politics against a clinical nutcase with fascist aspirations. Therefore, because it’s terrified of being tagged with “liberal bias,” the MSM proceeds to sanitize, or ignore entirely, Trump’s babble, conspiratorial claptrap, incoherence, and ignorance. Depicting him as normal is arguably the ultimate in false equivalence. It betrays the media’s mission to tell readers the truth.
And if Trump wins in November, it will deserve a hefty share of the blame.