Annals of Sanewashing: NYT Labels Trump’s Confession of Psychological Unfitness as Leadership
Remember the term “sanewashing,” which Parker Malloy used to describe how the press minimizes Trump’s ramblings to describe them as something reasonable to people who don’t see them personally?
Four years ago, in an article for Media Matters for America, I warned that journalists were sanitizing Donald Trump’s incoherent ramblings to make them more palatable for the average voter. The general practice went like this: The press would take something Trump said or did—for instance, using a visit to the Centers for Disease Control to ask about Fox News’s ratings, insult then–Washington Governor Jay Inslee, rant about his attempt to extort Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden, and downplay the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S.—and write them up as The New York Times did: “Trump Says ‘People Have to Remain Calm’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak.” This had the effect of making it seem like Trump’s words and actions seemed cogent and sensible for the vast majority of Americans who didn’t happen to watch his rant live.
[snip]
This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.
The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality.
These three paragraphs about why Donald Trump wants to take over Greenland when the US already has a base there, the rights to establish more bases, the ability to mine its minerals really exist in NYT’s third milking of their interview with Donald Trump:
“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland — three times the size of Texas but with a population of less than 60,000. He seemed to dismiss the value of having Greenland under the control of a close NATO ally.
When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
The conversation made clear that in Mr. Trump’s view, sovereignty and national borders are less important than the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West.
First of all, NYT interjected that “real estate mogul’s” comment; I assure you, Trump is not going to start building hotels in Greenland.
But more … uh … insane still, after Trump describes contemplating blowing up the alliance that has been the centerpiece of American national security since World War II out of a psychological need to own other people and other countries, nothing more, the NYT describes it to be a comment about Trump’s imagination that he is “the protector of the West.”
You’re both fucking insane! Donald Trump, for contemplating making the US and Europe less safe because of his own psychological inadequacies that drive him to covet big empty spaces on a map, and the NYT for describing it as the exact opposite of what it is, not Donald Trump needing to tend to Donald Trump’s increasing fragile psyche, but instead as something that protects the West rather than destroys the very concept of it.
This is how access journalism works. You give an outlet that spent the entirety of the Biden Administration bitching that they didn’t get any sitdown interviews with the President two hours to watch the President ramble incoherently, and in return for that access — the latest of a series of stories screaming, look at us!! Donald Trump takes our calls and tells us nothing!! — you describe the most dangerous kind of malignant Narcissism as the opposite of what it is.
Surprisingly, the Guardian also sane-washed the NYT interview article. Depressing.
i won’t link to either of the two articles i saw.
What appears to be an exclusive access resonates as a carefully curated performance by all..
meanwhile, backstage
all the handlers, aides and stylists huddle, the tough ones lounge and mingle, all their tiny fingers crossed and
exchange the odd nod of teamwork
with a hope that he doesn’t mouth off too much because ‘we’ve got this’ rules.
and the Times won’t misbehave because there’s ol’ Steve the bouncer on the couch behind them
‘take the rest of the day off, Leavitt.
the boss did good today’
thank you Emptywheel,
the beacon of hope and truth
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Steven Cheung looks like a prime candidate to join ICE.
Are they looking for pigs? If so, there ya go!
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Note to Putin, Xi, and other authoritarians obsessed with controlling the press through prior restraint: you’d save a lot of effort, money, and aggravation by giving journalists (“journalists”?) a profit motive and periodic access to you (“exclusive”). They’ll sell your vision (such as it is) for you. The more insane it is, the more normal they’ll make it look.
Stalin’s playbook—Walter Duranty’s coverage of Stalin’s Holomodor, the forced famine of Ukraine (killing upwards of four million Ukrainians in Europe’s breadbasket) won him fancy digs in Moscow and a Pulitzer amidst Stalin’s purges, for which the NYT has never apologized or given back.
Search “Maggie Duranty” for a chilling modern-day analogue—surprised to see she wasn’t there yesterday.
Future historians will look back and wonder why the mainstream media was so fawning towards Donald Trump during his rise to power. After all, his only real success in life was as the “star” of a really bad reality TV show that was about to be cancelled when he decided to plunge into politics. He was an utter failure in everything else he did and was considered a laughingstock in NY social circles. Since his electoral clobbering in 2020 and the frenetic run-up to January 6th, Trump has descended into hateful incoherence. His speech and ramblings have become ever more disjointed, vitriolic and bitter. The shooting in PA really snapped his psyche and he is now just a bile-filled, demented old narcissistic fool who is going to take the whole world down in his egocentric death spiral.
This…^
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Pity that no one at the NYT – well-staffed with social, political and wealth elite employees – has lived with a seriously troubled dominant family member or obtained a passing grade in Psych 101.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.
This is the party that says we need to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Oh, there I go again! I keep forgetting he’s doing this all for us. I need to be more thankful.
Jimmy Kimmel did a beautiful takedown of Trump saying he doesn’t care about money because he has a higher purpose.
https://youtu.be/w4-Vnatjopc?t=810
And they all are unaware of the 9th Commandment, especially the uber religious types like Vance, Leavitt, et al.
As the great theologian Charlie Kirk taught me, nowhere in the Trump bible does it say Trump cannot grab women or steal countries. Prove me wrong.
That Times example goes beyond sanewashing. It goes so far towards fawning that the reporters have forgotten how to write–and the editors to render their work even quasi-felicitous.
How do you “discuss” something “with a real estate mogul’s eye”? Does this involve Trump assuming that Jack Reacher look he mustered for his Atlanta mug shot? Is *that* what a “real estate mogul’s eye” looks like? Leaving aside the fact that Donald Trump never was an actual mogul–he merely played one on TV–this is lazy writing.
Dumbing your work down always shows up in your prose.
I was similarly struck by the unusual format (a multi-journalist interview?) and treatment of the NYT’s material (a rollout over several days and several articles?). Reading across the articles, it all felt amorphous and I couldn’t make it add up.
Today’s episode of the NYT’s “The Daily” podcast has the host speaking with the reporters involved, and it sheds a little more light. Two takeaways for me were:
1. The younger reporters, such as Zolan Kanno-Youngs, tended to ask more pointed questions: is “part of your immigration agenda …also aimed at changing the racial makeup of this country?” The veteran reporter, David Sanger, was far more glossy (“He is a bundle of contradictions!”). At the end of the podcast, when asked for takeaways from the interview, the younger reporters also tended to get closer to calling a spade a spade: Trump is driven by an insatiable need for approval, he is out of touch, the Oval Office is chaotic, etc. Sanger is definitely sane-washing (“all presidents in their second term turn more to foreign policy”). I’m tempted to read between the lines, but I’ll leave it there–once I could hear the reporters, there were some different perspectives in the room.
2. Despite these inferred differences, no one was on Team Democracy. The impression I had was that they interpreted their individual and collective jobs as “we report what happened,” and they did not want to connect the dots: this man is delusional and is psychologically incapable of facing facts, he is unstable, he is the neediest bully to ever hold the office, he has SO MANY characteristics that make for a terrible leader, let alone a leader of a democracy–it’s all staring us right in the face. I assume that the NYT crew wants the readers to draw that conclusion for themselves, but it’s difficult to do when there are so many layers of normalization piled on top of it. (It also doesn’t help that Trump has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the Times–that can only reinforce whatever instincts they have to self-neuter.) Even as Trump is saying truly wild stuff — further out there than Nixon telling Frost, “It’s not illegal when the president does it” — they make it sound like differences of opinion, like both sides have valid points of view, like there’s a coherence behind the Trump administration’s actions. It makes me wonder what the German press was like in the lead up to 1933. We know what the strategy was from the authoritarians (attack them as Lugenpresse, physically assault them, co-opt them–same as now), but what was the view like from inside the press corps? And do they teach these topics in J-school??
Apparently foreign policy is judged on how it would play at a B-level military-fantasy script writers conference. Notice them threatening several countries on just about opposite sides of the globe. Anybody thought about the logistics, the army-crawling-on-it’s-belly aspect of these actions?
And who wants to fight for Trump and Hegseth?
When it’s all said and done and the Sulzberger’s get an offer they can’t refuse and give up their Trust giving them editorial control of the Times. Well they will be richer.
The Times is perpetually discouraging in their refusal to do journalism. Trump claimed the Minneapolis ICE agent who killed Ms. Good was “run over.” The video showed no such thing. To not take that as evidence (of dementia, but no need to label if that makes the NYT squeamish) so extreme that the man can’t make out reality even when it is on videotape in front of him is a deep disservice to the country.
That there appears to no longer be a political penalty for lying is a failure of voters demanding too little. But his age is an inescapable fact. If our aging President kept facing “disconnected from reality” critiques every time he displays that disconnection, his lies might begin to be more dangerous for his public standing.
Amusingly, just this morning I told a friend in Ukraine that Trump repeats whatever the last person he talked to said. So now we know who Trump heard from last (about Renee Nicole Good’s murder).
The Times used up their President-with-dementia lede on Biden. Now might be a good time to ask whether that was retribution for Joe not giving them an interview, since Trump The Thirsty got such bootlicking treatment in return for his.
The Felon Guy claiming he doesn’t need international laws because of his morality. And that he’s an aesthetic guy.
Can’t they even hear him?
I read one comment elseweb where they think he meant “mortality”. But his brain couldn’t produce that word.
This should be a bigger story than ICE’s ninth shooting/murder. Trump just declared himself Dictator.
The official conservative movement (FOXnews, HATEradio, corporate press) have been helping republicans push the narrative that the worst human impulses are “manly” (!) Rage, violence, hatred, racism, war, CRUELTY… strong and manly! Kindness, acceptance, inclusion, progressivenes are: “woke”, “liberal”, “weak & female” etc. And worst of all, they present this psychotic notion as being a genuine type of Darwinism “Survival of the strong”, and all that happycrappy. Even half-way decent publications such as the Guardian seem to think “Might makes Right!” makes sense.
Trump’s first election was the first big signal of a long and slowly building backlash against the values of the 20th century, racial equality and feminism most central among them. I thought we over-focused on the racial elements of Trump’s hatred of everything Obama represented, and underestimated the way misogyny fused with and fueled that repression.
Now it seems like Stephen Miller has made the Macho Man credo dominant, but that machismo remains racist. The fragile white man who hates anything feminine must also hate the people progressives advocate for, otherizing those people on the basis of inborn characteristics because those are so easy to recognize//exclude.
The fragile white man blends in with those like himself. He mistakes force for “strength” when it is only a sign of his own weakness.
“for making the US and Europe less safe”
I think you’ve hit on the crux of the matter here, or more to the point the messaging that needs to take place to frame his actions.
Everything trump does makes us less safe as a nation. That’s what the messaging needs to be. First and foremost, his actions have clearly defined the US’s new place in the global order as The Bad Guys. Not North Korea, Russia, or China, but the USA, by far, is the biggest threat out there right now. This re-orientation is of course of literally incalculable value to Putin and Xi Jinping.
He attacks and alienates our allies, and threatens the destruction of NATO. This isolates and weakens us. And makes Putin and Xi smile with glee.
He destroys the rule of law and norms of international order. This weakens the whole world catastrophically, but especially the US, who were the primary beneficiaries of this global stability.
He normalizes hatred, greed, selfishness, and cruelty. MAGA delights in each of these and is proud of it. Trump has broken every one of the Ten Commandments and treats the Seven Deadly Sins as a Daily To-Do list. Any movement towards Trump is movement away from God or Spirituality.
He foments the division and fracture of our country. He has no interest in uniting anything.
His total lack of understanding even the most basic principals of economics, capital markets, interest rates, currency markets, stock markets, tariffs, deficits, and central bank dynamics puts the US in a position of unprecedented weakness, with a captain of the ship who has no idea what he’s doing, just spouting nonsense at every press conference and speech, the proverbial kid who is stumbling through a book report after not having read the book, or possibly not even knowing how to read. This is why Xi Jinping has beaten him soundly in trade negotiations, recently gaining access to Nvidia’s better chips, which never would have happened with any competent President.
Finally, he seeks to actually destroy the US. I firmly believe that the goal is the destruction of the US in its present form, that will require him to take on ever more emergency powers to deal with the chaos he has created, and then to rebuild the US in the image of Russia, with himself as the dictator, and his cronies as the oligarchs, looting the country at every step. I believe Project 2025 detailed much of this.
Attacking smaller countries that can’t fight back is in no way a show of strength, on the contrary it makes him look pathetic and weak, a loser/bully who only picks fights with someone much weaker than himself. Makes the US look like a schoolyard bully.
MAGA is born of weakness, and makes America weak as a result. Framing everything Trump does in terms of how it weakens us is part of how we can beat him. It’s my hope that the tide is turning and more people each day are seeing his insanity for what it is.
Trump’s ultimate master is Putin, who has exploited Trump’s many weaknesses (including, maybe especially when he was out of office) to achieve the long-term Soviet goal of destroying US primacy. Putin’s most effective strategy has involved flattering Trump into believing that the ideas he espouses are his own, “genius” inspirations, all of them suspiciously geared toward torpedoing America’s standing among nations.
Stephen Miller has used Trump as a glove to give his own psychotic mission the veneer of political popularity that his nakedly cruel and unconstitutional hand never would receive from the public. He stands at the head of the line of sociopaths (Noem, RFKJ, Vance) all seeking to use Donald Trump to accomplish their own sick and/or selfish ends.
But they are side shows. This all goes back to Putin. His long game has found its perfect realization. Otherwise, we would have the political will to call it for what it is: war.
“the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West”
That is a painfully deliberate effort to frame Trump’s foreign policy as cooperative and constructive in the face of his repeated explanation that the US has the power to do whatever it/he likes, and what he likes is tribute and territory. He has no interest in “protecting the West” beyond favoring Putin, while the rest of his administration has repeatedly explained their support and focus on white Christian supremacy. If that’s what the Times means by “the West” they should be as honest as the Trump administration and say so.
The introductory article set the stage: 2 hours, 4 reporters, Trump and various aides (minders) popping in and out. Given Trump’s tendency to “weave”) how much of the interview is Trump, his aides or the reporters’ translations?
Trump doesn’t use phrases like “singular role as protector of the West”. Presumably that is either an aide’s interjection or a reporter’s translation.
The quote from Trump about ownership giving more rights than contracts does sound like the prattling of Trump, who was really a terrible businessman with terrible instincts.
Did the NYT (“fake news”) take him up on his offer to look?
In the meeting with oil execs, gets a bit distracted to look out the door windows at the non-existent ballroom with laughter in the background and invites the fake news (where did that come from?) to go back and take a look…
First 40 seconds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdK88Z3znJY