Official portraits of Vice President Kamala Harris (above), and former President Donald Trump (below) from Wikimedia Commons
Even before Tuesday’s debate between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the term “sane-washing” was attracting attention among journalists frustrated with media coverage of the former president. On September 4, The New Republic published an article by Parker Molloy contending that news outlets have been “sanitizing Donald Trump’s incoherent ramblings to make them more palatable for the average voter.” For example, Molloy wrote, when Trump said children were getting gender-transition surgeries at school without parents’ knowledge, a “glowing piece” in The New York Times “didn’t even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen.”
The very next day, Trump furnished smoking-gun evidence of Molloy’s point. Asked “what specific piece of legislation” he would advance as president to make childcare affordable, Trump wandered through one incomplete, off-topic sentence after another, never naming a single policy. The Times, too, responded as if scripted, blandly describing Trump’s word-salad as “a jumbled and meandering answer, Mr. Trump said he would commit to legislation but did not offer a specific plan.”
The following day, after tweeting that sane-washing had become his new favorite word, climate journalist Bill McKibben applied a similar critique to Trump’s utterances on climate change. Writing in the Guardian, McKibben quoted the former president verbatim and at length from a conversation on a recent podcast show. In a mish-mash of bizarre non-sequiturs, Trump asserted that global warming was renamed “climate change” because Earth was actually cooling, that climate scientists had been poor school students, that seas will rise a quarter of an inch in 500 years, and that the real problem is “nuclear warming.”
Trump’s remarks were nothing less than “gibberish,” McKibben observed. But it was dangerous gibberish, the journalist added, because Trump’s “friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy” that would “bolster oil, gas and coal” when humanity is already “on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system.”
At Tuesday’s debate, only one question was asked specifically about climate change. (Neither the moderators nor the candidates made the climate connection to separate exchanges about fracking.) Noting that Trump has called climate change “a hoax,” Harris touted the Biden administration’s clean energy investments and, contradictorily, its “historic” increase in gas production. Trump said not a word about climate. As with his childcare answer a few days earlier, he unleashed a torrent of unrelated, dubious points that left the question unanswered.
Because the debate was televised, ordinary people could see Trump first hand and draw their own conclusions. Most of the time, though, the public’s impression of any politician is filtered through media reports. In a democracy, journalists are paid by our employers, but we work for the public. Voters deserve plain-spoken reporting about all candidates, especially about an issue as urgent as the climate emergency. Sane-washing is not part of our job description.
