At 78, disgraced, twice impeached, and 34-count criminally convicted former president Donald Trump, is now the oldest major party candidate for president in U.S. history. With President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the campaign, there’s been renewed focus on Trump’s age and his obvious cognitive decline in recent years.
In his speeches and interviews Trump, still fumes about his false allegation that the 2020 election was stolen from him and engages in incoherent rants about fictional movie character “Dr. Hannibal Lecter,” while rambling in bizarre tirades on sharks and electric batteries. More dangerously, Trump repeats lies that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio; advocates for a “violent day” of policing that will end crime; and dishonestly accuses Democrats of supporting the murder of babies after they’re born. After Hurricane Helene carved a trail of destruction across the southeast U.S., Trump spread potentially deadly disinformation charging that the federal government’s rescue efforts are excluding Republican voters and that FEMA funds are being diverted to immigrants.
Media critic Parker Molloy, publisher of the Present Age newsletter, wrote a piece for the New Republic on Sept. 4 titled, “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity,” accusing corporate media outlets of “sanewashing” Trump’s unhinged behavior by rewriting and reframing his words to create the illusion that the Republican candidate is rational and lucid. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Molloy, who explains why she believes the political medias’s practice of sanitizing Trump’s unhinged speech poses a threat to informed democracy.
PARKER MOLLOY: The term “sanewashing” kind of took off, so I wrote this article that The New Republic published about it. And then I think it was the very next day, Trump was giving a speech at the New York Economic Club and he was asked about childcare costs, and he went on a two-minute rant about tariffs and all sorts of other things.
And it was just such a perfect example of sanewashing, because the way it was covered was as though it was a candidate giving a speech at an economic forum, you know, where you didn’t get the fact that he was talking for two minutes uninterrupted, rambling about tariffs and how tariffs alone would lower the cost of childcare somehow.
And so I think that’s why the term kind of stuck and took off the way it did.
SCOTT HARRIS: Parker, when major media outlets like The New York Times and some of the big news networks cover for Trump, sanitize his remarks, make him sound more rational and lucid. What’s the motivation for that? And I always think about the kinds of games that major media play labeled as “both-sidesism,” false equivalence, fear of being labeled the “liberal media.”
How much of that do you think plays into this cleanup that the media has done for so long on Donald Trump and what he says?
PARKER MOLLOY: I think it plays a significant role in that. I believe it does. I do think that there’s some aspect of it where journalists have been watching Trump for so long that they’ve kind of “baked in” the decline. They’ve baked in everything that, you know, that makes Trump, Trump and then they’re trying to just give people the rest of the story.
But most people aren’t as plugged in. And I think that you do have situations where journalists will, to avoid giving the appearance of being biased to try to fight back, you know, proactively fight back against charges of being liberal, of having having some sort of anti-conservative bias, which is something that gets talked about all over and over.
And that was one of the things that, you know, on the left, there’s Media Matters and that’s one of very few organizations that focus on looking at the problems in media from the left. But on the right, there are so many resources that try to push this narrative that the media is liberal. The media has a bias against conservatives.
And I think that there are a lot of reporters, a lot of journalists, a lot of editors who want to avoid that sort of criticism. And so they grade Trump on a curve. They write about him in a way that if Kamala Harris went out and did the same exact thing, they write about him differently. And that’s the problem right there.
They write about him differently than they would about any other candidate.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Parker Molloy (18:57) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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