Sanewashing? The banality of crazy? A decade into the Trump era, media hasn't figured him out
Is the media “sanewashing” Donald Trump
NEW YORK — Nearly a decade into the Trump Era of politics, less than a month from his third Election Day as the Republican candidate for president and there is still remarkably little consensus within the media about how best to cover Donald Trump.
Are reporters “sanewashing” Trump, or are they succumbing to the “banality of crazy?" Should his rallies be aired at length, or not at all? To fact-check or not fact-check?
“If it wasn't so serious, I would just be fascinated by all of it,” said Parker Molloy, media critic and author of The Present Age column on Substack. “If it didn't have to do with who is going to be president, I would watch this and marvel at how difficult it is to cover one person who seems to challenge all of the rules of journalism.”
Books and studies will be written about Trump and the press long after he is gone. He's always been press-conscious and press-savvy, even as a celebrity builder in Manhattan who took a keen interest in what tabloid gossip columns said about him. Most issues stem from Trump's disdain for constraints, his willingness to say the outrageous and provably untrue, and for his fans to believe him instead of those reporting on him.
It has even come full circle, where some experts now think the best way to cover him is to give people a greater opportunity to hear what he says — the opposite of what was once conventional wisdom.
Molloy first used the phrase “sanewashing” this fall to describe a tendency among journalists to launder some of Trump's wilder or barely coherent statements to make them seem like the cogent pronouncements of a typical politician. One example she cites: CNN distilling a Trump post on Truth Social that rambled on about
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