Donald Trump can ramble. In public appearances, the former president has a penchant for hopping from one topic to the next to yet another in a matter of seconds, following a train of thought that’s not always obvious. Do media reports make his word jumbles sound undeservedly coherent?
“There’s a hot new term doing the rounds among media critics: ‘sanewashing,'” Jon Allsop said at Columbia Journalism Review. The term suggests that news outlets take Trump’s “incoherent, highly abnormal rants” and — in an attempt to extract meaning — process them into something “coherent or normal.” The result creates a “misleading impression” for readers and viewers who didn’t watch the former president’s original comments.
Trump, naturally, has a different take: He calls his rhetorical style “the weave,” Margaret Hartmann said at New York magazine. “I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together,” he said last month at a Pennsylvania rally, “and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.'”
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Trump reached a “new level of incoherence” when asked about child care during a recent appearance, Isabel Fattal said at The Atlantic. His 338-word answer jumped from child care to tariffs to deficits to a discussion of his “America First” philosophy, leaving plenty of observers mystified. “His answer makes absolutely no sense,” Fattal said. But stories from The Associated Press and CNN still tried to “impose sense where there is none” with headlines like “Trump Suggests Tariffs Can Help Solve Rising Child Care Costs in a Major Economic Speech.” That’s not helpful to voters. “It would help if journalists would report accurately on what we’re all seeing in front of us.”
“Where’s the line between paraphrasing and ‘sanewashing?'” Matt Bernius said at Outside the Beltway. It’s a challenge for journalists to take Trump’s “circuitous stylings” and whittle them down to “traditional, brief news quotes.” That’s not just misleading: It’s a “dangerous form of bias that creates a “disconnect between reality and reported news.” The problem? “Trump’s quotes often defy summation.”
Discerning fact from fiction
“Readers, too, have a role to play” in putting a stop to sanewashing, Parker Molloy said at The New Republic. Audiences should “seek out primary sources” — read or watch Trump’s speeches and interviews directly instead of relying on reports — and support outlets that prize accuracy over misguided attempts at “balance.” Otherwise, the “public’s ability to discern fact from fiction erodes.”
Trump’s campaign insists his speaking style is proof of rhetorical mastery. “Unlike Kamala Harris,” a campaign spokesperson told The New York Times, “President Trump speaks for hours, telling multiple impressive stories at the same time.” But the former president has gotten defensive about how his remarks are reported. “The fake news, you know what they say? ‘He rambled.'” Trump said this month. “That’s not rambling.” The skeptics remain. “He is trying to pretend there is a strategy or logic behind it,” said one biographer, “when there isn’t.”
