How the Media Sanewashes Trump

The gap between how Trump acts and how he is covered is getting wider.

Donald Trump giving a very normal speech today during the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York City. (Getty Images)

One of the main ways in which the legacy media fails to cover Donald Trump accurately is the gulf between what an objective observer witnesses when the president speaks and how it is described in mainstream news publications.

A starting point for understanding Trump is that there is no relationship between the truth and what comes out of his mouth. Most people, even politicians, consciously anchor their words to some version of consensus reality in their head. They know when they are straying a bit too far into bullshitting and when they cross over into outright lying. Trump has no such anchor. His utterances sail freely between oceans of hyperbole, bullshit, and lies. When he occasionally arrives in a harbor of truth, it is merely by accident.

As someone who has watched Trump closely since 2015, gone to dozens of his events, spent hours observing him at the White House, asked him questions in the briefing room, and interviewed him at Mar-a-Lago after he left office, I don’t believe this is even a slightly controversial opinion.

His total disdain for the truth is matched only by his disregard for the law and any ethical norms. Again, I don’t see this as debatable if you’ve been paying even cursory attention to his disregard for constitutional constraints and the almost cartoonish corruption of his crypto self-dealing and other schemes to use his office to enrich himself and his family.

But for reasons I still find difficult to understand, the mainstream media struggles to convey these obvious truths about the president. Accounts of his speeches—often insane ramblings studded with lies, non sequiturs, vicious personal attacks, and nonsensical policy prescriptions—are so swaddled in euphemism and journalistic jargon that these writeups transform Trump’s extremism into ho-hum rhetoric.

The effect is that mainstream coverage of Trump sanitizes his speeches—or “sanewashes” them, as The New Republic has called it—with reporters going out of their way to extract grand theories, notable policy proposals, or a coherent set of ideas buried in Trump’s remarks. This kind of bloodless coverage may have made sense in an era before the country was governed by an unhinged populist authoritarian who lies about everything.

But today it’s akin to reviewing a show by the late absurdist comedian Gallagher, who covered his live audiences with smashed fruit, and only commenting on his punchlines. I’m sure Gallagher had some decent jokes, but the only thing that stood out and that anyone remembers is that this slightly manic man inexplicably took a giant mallet to watermelons.

To be fair, it is not easy to fully capture the firehose of craziness that spews forth during a long Trump speech, such as the president’s hourlong address to the U.N. General Assembly today in Manhattan. It is a lot easier for reporters who have seen the Trump act many, many times to sift through the bullshit and meandering asides and pick out a few headline-worthy news bites. But over time, this sane-washing process anesthetizes the public to Trump’s true nature.

The Wall Street Journal’s headline today was “Trump Says Migration and Climate-Change Policies Are Destroying the West,” which is true—he did indeed say that. But watch the speech or read the transcript, and you’ll be overwhelmed by the fact that nearly every paragraph includes nonsensical claims, provable lies, hilarious exaggerations, and rambling stories that would cause you to question the speaker’s mental competence if they came from anyone else.

I don’t mean to pick on the Journal, which tried to capture the full sweep of the lunacy by noting the speech was “filled with grievances about ongoing wars, windmills and malfunctioning escalators” and “mirrored his campaign rallies in the U.S., in which he shifted from subject to subject and often made unsubstantiated or contradictory claims.”

This is not a Journal problem but a systemic media problem rooted in the way that Trump has picked the lock of traditional journalism by taking advantage of its norms and rules. At most of these institutions, it is fine to fact-check Trump and note some of the unusual aspects of the speech. But it is still taboo in most newsrooms to make more sweeping claims that provide the key context for the speech—and which every reporter privately knows to be true: that Trump almost always lies, that he knows next to nothing about policy, and that his basic project is to undermine American democracy and consolidate power in the hands of his far-right MAGA movement.

I realize it’s not always easy for political reporters and commentators who know all of this to maintain a focus on these fundamental truths when covering Trump. Old-timers in newsrooms like to remind young reporters that the first three letters in news spell new. And after a decade, Trump remains unmatched in his ability to exploit this journalistic first principle to his benefit.

But it is worth asking: How much crazier would Trump have to get for his craziness to be the main news in stories about him?

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell famously wrote. Part of the struggle, he said, is “the power of ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later.” Orwell argued that it is far better to face such facts sooner rather than later, because, he warned, when finally “a false belief bumps up against solid reality,” it is “usually on a battlefield.”