Sanewashing and the abusive cycle of Donald Trump campaign coverage
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In the last few weeks, a new term has swept the political discourse: sanewashing. Coined by journalist Parker Molloy, the term describes what happens when the political press covers a candidate who is saying completely horrible or incomprehensible things in a way that attempts to make those ideas more palatable for a perceived mainstream audience. In theory, this could happen with any candidate from any party; in 2024, however, this is mostly happening with Donald Trump.
Voters who rely solely on traditional news sources are presented with a version of Trump that bears little resemblance to reality. They see a former president who, while controversial, appears to operate within the bounds of normal political discourse—or at worst, is breaking with it in some kind of refreshing manner. You can see this folie à deux at work in a recent [New York] Times piece occasioned by Trump’s amplification of social media posts alleging that Harris owed her career to the provision of “blowjobs”: “Though he has a history of making crass insults about his opponents, the reposts signal Mr. Trump’s willingness to continue to shatter longstanding norms of political speech.” Meanwhile, those who seek out primary sources encounter a starkly different figure—one prone to conspiracy theories, personal attacks, and extreme rhetoric.
Parker Molloy
The problem... has not gotten better.
There are any number of theories you could cook up as to why the press covers Trump, especially, in this fashion and Republicans more generally. In the era after the hyper-close 2000 election, they got addicted to the excitement of the horse race. The surprising results of the 2016 election caught them flat-footed, and they've overcompensated accordingly. A fealty to the idea of presenting both sides fairly has created a vicious feedback loop where one party's candidate can go totally off the deep end, but he cannot be covered that way because he's the nominee of a major political party. They like Donald Trump and want him to win the election. Etc.
Any of these could be true. All of them could be true. I have worked in enough newsrooms to doubt any of them are consciously true – except maybe the "both sides" one, since journalists do love fetishizing objectivity. There is a level of agency implied in all of them that makes journalists say, "But I'm only trying to be fair." And I have never known a newsroom that has had the level of organizational discipline that would be required to pull any of the above off.
When trapped in a cycle like this, I tend to look toward larger structural questions, and the more I look at this one, the more I see it rooted in something sneakily pervasive in our society: the ways in which abusive power dynamics tend to skew perceptions in the direction of the abuser. Please note that when I'm saying this, I'm not saying "All Republicans are abusers" or anything similar. I am saying, however, that Trump has baked these power dynamics into his platform on a very fundamental level, and the press has largely been oblivious to how that has manipulated them.
Trump's platform containing abusive power dynamics seems obvious on its face. The man is threatening to deport millions of immigrants – illegal and otherwise – and has promised it will be "bloody." But there are more subtle manifestations of this, too, especially among his supporters.
In 2016, as Donald Trump was well on his way to a rout of the Republican primaries, pollster and political scientist Matthew MacWilliams conducted a survey of South Carolina voters for my former publication Vox. In it, he found a strong link between people who supported Trump and people who tended to be strongly supportive of authoritarian leadership.
How we measure a propensity toward authoritarianism has almost nothing to do with larger questions of politics. Since the early 1990s, surveys designed to track authoritarian worldviews ask questions not about the world at large but about the home. In short, the easiest way to predict if someone sees the world as a system of hierarchies designed to elevate certain people and crush others lies in if they believe that children are on this planet largely to be well-behaved, obedient, and servile toward their parents. (You can read more about this here.)
Karyl McBride Ph.D.
While there are certainly loving homes where parents prioritize children's obedience, it is not hard to see how easily those priorities spin out into more toxic and even abusive situations. Too often in these homes, the power imbalance inherent in the parent/child relationship becomes mixed with a religious culture that has invented an absolute patriarchy, which leads to whole churches where there exists next to no accountability structure for those in power. That, needless to say, is dangerous.
Emily St. James
Within these families, churches, and other organizations, there exists a whole substrata of people who enable abuse, whether deliberately or by pretending not to see the things they see. Sometimes, that enabling is easy to empathize with. The classic example, of course, is in a home with an abusive parent. The children in that home might do everything they can not to wake the bear, metaphorically speaking. That might mean saying whatever the parent wants to hear. It might mean actively fawning over them. In some cases, it might mean older siblings absorbing abuse that might otherwise be directed at younger siblings.
Yet there are plenty of other examples of enabling that are less easily defensible. Consider, for instance, the ways that Miramax employees looked the other way when it came to Harvey Weinstein's misbehavior or how too much of the international community (particularly the United States) has normalized the ongoing devastation in Gaza by largely looking the other way.
All of which brings me back to how the press covers the Trump-era Republican Party.
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What I think too many journalists fail to understand (and what former evangelical Christians know all too well) is that the larger project of the Christian right for decades – especially post-George W. Bush – has been replicating the abuse-enabling dynamics that undergird its worldview at scale. In Trump, they've found their perfect avatar for that idea, even if he does not, in any way, present as a practicing Christian. Reading, say, the Project 2025 document through this lens proves instructive. The document becomes not a policy proposal but a kind of argument for a series of systems that have increasingly fallen out of favor with the public at large being forced onto the rest of us via the state.
Of course, Trump has said he disavows Project 2025, despite the document being written by some of his greatest supporters. And the press has repeated that claim largely credulously, even if individual reporters might point out his many ties to those who wrote the document. And that's before you get to his endless waffling on abortion rights and whether he would ban them, in which he has taken something like four separate positions, even as we know what the movement he's at the forefront of has as its aim.
This dynamic – Trump stands at the head of a movement that clearly wants to do something, but he says he won't do that, so it's fine – has replicated itself endlessly throughout the press since Trump rose to prominence. Every time it does, I'm reminded of a father at the head of a patriarchal family unit changing his mind on a dime and expecting everyone else to go with whatever he said most recently. What's more, a reporter can give Trump's statements all the context in the world, can even outright call them lies, but in treating each and every one of them as newsworthy, they create the reality Trump wants anyway: My word is the word until I completely change my mind.
(Sidebar: As a trans person, this dynamic has been particularly obvious to me when transphobes invade the mentions of literally anybody I know to invalidate our identities on any grounds they can think of. The implication is always that their anti-trans pseudoscience must be right because it's what they believe, and they say so. It possesses an almost religious fervor, and I, for one, don't like it.)
Thus, the underlying dynamic of so much political coverage in the 21st century has been: Democrats are the responsible ones; Republicans are the ones who might destroy everything. But it's not their fault if they do. It's on everybody else to keep them in check. Just as we might attempt to placate that abusive father by saying, "No, sorry, it was my fault, it won't happen again," even though he is the one who just hit us, too much coverage of Republican policy boils down to: Look what Democrats made them do.
This dynamic extends beyond Trump's candidacies and administration. For as long as I've been alive, conservatives have been shouting that the press is too liberal, and the press has been doing its best to prove otherwise by following the right further and further into a world where, like, Richard Hanania is treated as a serious, sober voice on race in America. It's an expert manipulation of the press's love of objectivity – and it's, again, reminiscent of an abusive parent constantly moving the goalposts to win their love.
In 2024, I think we have gotten much better at understanding the ways in which toxic power structures infect everything in our society. At the same time, I think we still don't entirely understand the ways these structures replicate themselves on an interpersonal basis, the ways in which toxic power manipulates all of us all of the time. Even when you are smart enough to see it, you aren't smart enough to constantly resist it, and it will always use your own tools against you. I don't know a way out of that particular trap, but a good place to start might be talking about the way things actually are, instead of chasing a fantasy those with power insist must be true.
This week's reading music: "She Looked Like Me" by Magdalena Bay
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