Trump Has Not Been ‘Sane-Washed’

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.”