We are less than a week out (1 Nov 2024) from the US election. Media outlets are saying that the polls are so close but many are calling Donald Trump as the winner.
But how can a man who has spouted such nonsense as the following and been clearly identified as weird still be in the running?
Some well known Trumpisms
- “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” After North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times. (Twitter, Feb 2018)
- And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it [Covid] out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? I’m not a doctor. But I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what. [pointing to his head] (Drinking or injecting bleach is poisonous).
- Windmills cause cancer (2 Aug 2019)
- The kidney is a part of the heart (10 July 2019) (Not part of the heart)
- “We have it (COVID-19) totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.” 22/01/2020 (1.2 million deaths in the US)
- “All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.” Jan 2024 (Magnets work under water).
The list goes on and famously includes during a presidential debate includes accusations of migrants eating pets, etcetera (fact checks showed it did not happen). The latest is leading a speech with a description of Anorld Palmer’s penis (19 Oct 2024):
When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable. I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.
This resulted in a podcaster, Dan Pfeiffer posting on X:
According to the most recent NYT/Siena poll, the top three issues for swing voters include: 1. Inflation 2. Abortion 3. The size of Arnold Palmer’s schlong.
My favourite story as quoted in the 2022 book The Divider: Trump in the White House (by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser) is that Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, claimed that Trump had asked him: “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” to which Kelly replied that the German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off”. Trump then said: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him”. Its truth has been denied by Trump but there are plenty of corroborating stories of Trump’s admiration for German generals, which has had him nicknamed the Fanta Fuhrer.
Sanitisation of Trump
But somehow the man who knows nothing about most things is being considered as a viable President of the US. The way he is reported fails to point out his lack of understanding of basic concepts, his wavering mental facilities and the plainly outrageous and easily disprovable misinformation he spins.
The sanitisation of Trump’s words and ramblings has had media organisations in America recently accused of “sanewashing”. Sanewashing is a term created in 2020 referring to defunding the police in the US and only this year used to refer to how the media are reporting on Trump’s presidential campaign. It refers to “the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal”.
The meaning of sanewashing
Parker Molloy, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, seems to be the best commentator on what is happening:
Maybe it was when the New York Times wrote a straight-faced story about housing policy in the presidential race that treated Donald Trump’s authoritarian scheme for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants as a plan to lower rents. Or when multiple outlets failed to make any kind of big deal about the GOP nominee’s utterly bat-guano crazy assertion that kids are going to school and getting gender-reassignment operations there, without their parents knowing about it. It probably peaked with Trump’s lengthy and totally incoherent answer to a question about his child-care policy — ‘Child care is child care!’ he blurted out at one point — which was initially characterized by the Times as, “Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers.
He sums it up:
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.
Will sanewashing be the WOTY?
Molloy also suggests that sanewashing is looking like it will take out Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2024. It certainly will if Trump wins.