Thanks to Donald Trump’s ramblings, observers of the 2024 presidential campaign have popularized a handy new term: sane-washing, describing reporters’ tendency to render the Republican candidate’s most bizarre and incoherent statements into cogent English, shearing off the crazy in a misleading manner.
A leading example came after Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of New York last week, in which he made a number of ludicrous claims, including that his proposed “government-efficiency commission,” created “at the suggestion of Elon Musk,” would “totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months,” thereby saving “trillions of dollars.” Even more stupefying was his response to a question about how to make child care more affordable. Nothing short of the full transcript can do it justice, but here’s a partial sample: “I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with, uh, 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.”
Some news outlets, however, reported on Trump’s performance in a way that suggested he was making sense. Front-page headlines in major newspapers calmly relayed that Trump had proposed some reasonable-sounding policies. The New York Times went with “Trump Backs Federal Panel on Efficiency” above the fold. As for the child-care word salad, a Washington Post headline politely euphemized: “Trump Offers Confusing Plan to Pay for U.S. Child Care With Foreign Tariffs.”
These and other recent reports set off a round of “sane-washing” charges from liberal commentators against the news media. “As Trump’s statements grow increasingly unhinged in his old age, major news outlets continue to reframe his words, presenting a dangerously misleading picture to the public,” Parker Molloy wrote in The New Republic. Liberal pundits including Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Paul Krugman piled on.
News stories should not airbrush Trump’s authoritarian pronouncements or conceal his obviously loose grasp on reality. But the sane-washing criticism distorts the record by cherry-picking examples and exaggerating their importance. The news media doesn’t routinely protect Trump’s image, and it never has.
Even the coverage of Trump’s economics speech was hardly as bad as critics made it out to be. The Washington Post subheadline read, “The panelist at the Economic Club of New York who asked Trump about child care criticized his answer as ‘incomprehensible.’” NBC News went with the headline “‘Incoherent Word Salad’: Trump Stumbles When Asked How He’d Tackle Child Care.”
Arguably no public figure in American history has gotten worse press, and for longer, than Trump. This is not because journalists are out to get him, but because a straightforward rendering of the facts stacks up so overwhelmingly against him. For decades now, reporters have documented his racism, sexism, lies, hypocrisy, bellicosity, vulgarity, business flameouts, authoritarian tendencies, and criminality. Much of what we know to be true and indisputable about Trump has been a result of journalistic efforts. The rest—“Grab ’em by the pussy”—comes straight out of his mouth.
Far from sane-washing him, journalists have regularly called out Trump’s tendency to spout idiocy. His references to Hannibal Lecter during rallies have never been prettied up in the press (“nonsensical,” The Washington Post wrote). USA Today noted that Trump’s incomprehensible harangue about sharks and boat batteries this summer raised “questions about his fitness for the Oval Office.” Similarly, his recent riff about the price of bacon and wind energy “revived questions about his mental acuity,” according to The Guardian. His claims about children undergoing sex-change operations at school were widely debunked.
When sane-washing does occur, it’s usually not the last word on the subject. The Times may not have distinguished itself with its first swing at Trump’s child-care comments, but it got the story right in subsequent coverage. Trump “wandered through a thicket of unfinished sentences, non sequitur clauses and confusing logic,” Peter Baker, the paper’s chief White House correspondent, wrote a few days later, noting that Trump’s “rambling speeches, sometimes incoherent statements and extreme outbursts have raised questions about his own cognitive health.”
Despite the voluminous record to the contrary, the sane-washing critique persists because of two larger frustrations. One is the sense that Trump gets away with saying things that would cause a weeklong media cycle if any other politician said it. Trump so routinely goes off the rails that another coinage, by the political scientist Brian Klaas, writing in The Atlantic, has gained traction too: “the banality of crazy.” Rather than sane-washing, the greater risk has been that some of Trump’s alarming comments would get lost in the daily news cycle. Last September, for example, Trump proposed shooting shoplifters on sight—straightforwardly advocating extrajudicial murder of nonviolent criminal suspects. This wasn’t reported by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, or PBS for days, if ever. The New York Times wrote it up four days later, playing the story on page 14 of its print edition.
No doubt Trump is held to a lower standard—but this is largely because he so frequently lives down to that standard. There aren’t enough reporters in America to cover every one of his delusional claims, mental slips, or chaotic monologues.
The second frustration proceeds from the first. The sane-washing charge channels the critic’s exasperation at the fact that something like half the electorate still intends to vote for Trump, despite nearly a decade of his schtick. It implicitly suggests that voters would come to their senses and reject him if only the media would stop making him sound more normal than he really is. The likelier theory is that those voters are aware of the crazy and don’t mind it—and that the subset who somehow don’t know about it are not exactly avid news readers. An April poll by NBC News found that voters who read newspapers preferred Joe Biden over Trump 70 percent to 21 percent, whereas Trump led 53 percent to 27 percent among people who said they don’t follow political news. Trump’s enduring support is indeed worth puzzling over, but the answer is unlikely to be found by parsing mainstream media coverage.
The practice of sane-washing violates the basic aim of journalism, which is to accurately and fully convey reality. But in Trump’s case, it’s less of a problem than its critics think. Plenty of people support Trump no matter what he says, and the people most likely to be fooled by sane-washing probably aren’t reading the news in the first place.
