The Sane-Washing of Mad King Trump

In a recent speech at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, Donald Trump claimed that, before he returned to the Oval Office, the U.S. was “close to death.” 

He alleged to the crowd that he had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapon capabilities. He said the only jobs lost under his administration were those held by illegal immigrants, and that he’s fighting “an illegal alien invasion.” He claimed that in June, the U.S. had had zero illegal border crossings in the past month. 

In that same speech, Trump also repeatedly asserted he is a better president than both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. (It’s a fixation of his.) Trump also said he hates Democrats. 

“I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.” What he doesn’t hate is corn. But he accused the press of falsely claiming that he does: “You know, fake stories were put out there like I don’t like corn. I don’t like corn. I love corn. I just love it. But they give you fake news.”

Then he referred to bankers as “shylocks” — an antisemitic slur — and accused those bankers of cheating farmers out of their inheritances. 

In response to every bit of this rambling, incoherent, racist Iowa speech — yes, this was all from one speech — the New York Times ran a conventional piece about his budget bill:

President Trump took a victory lap on Thursday night after the House passed his sprawling domestic policy bill, which he muscled through Congress even as many in his party fear it will leave them vulnerable to political attacks ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Reader outcry forced a follow-up about the epithet, but the previous lies, along with every falsehood about Iran and immigration, went unchallenged. This is the kind of reporting that makes Trump sound like a normal president, saying normal things, rather than a deranged and elderly bigot shouting insults at his enemies. 

Editors and producers in the corporate press are becoming increasingly servile to  Republican politicians, Republican operatives, and Republican media as the Trump administration ramps up its authoritarian rule. It’s not just the reporting and writing; it’s the actions of media bosses as well. 

When a reporter holds the administration or the president to account, as ABC’s Terry Moran did,  Trump demands they be fired. And as we saw, they comply: ABC bosses bowed to his demands. Trump accused 60 Minutes of editing an interview to make his rival Kamala Harris look good, and sued Paramount; they settled the laughably frivolous suit so as not to anger Trump further. 

This deference is rarely if ever extended to Democratic politicians, whose every word is the subject of heated editorial debate. Former President Joe Biden, who struggled with a childhood stutter, was often described as gaffe-prone and portrayed — in the same papers that protect Trump — as elderly, confused, and incompetent. Biden managed to oversee the running of the federal government and not pick fights with world leaders in the Oval Office, but every time he tripped over his tongue or forgot someone’s name, it was a national crisis. 

Sadly for the president, quotable gaffes will get more attention — on cable news, social media and late-night TV — than a snoozy masterclass on foreign policy. When the official questions were done, a chorus of reporters shouted more, including one about Biden’s Harris-Trump mix-up.

The New York media in particular spent weeks asking NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” though Mamdani says he never used those words. Politico’s reporter Gregory Svirnovskiy reported on NBC’s Kristen Welker’s interview with Mamdani, amplifying the accusation:

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Sunday again declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” but emphasized he would be a mayor “that protects Jewish New Yorkers” if elected in November.

“That’s not language that I use,” Mamdani told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. “The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead this city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights.

A little less than two weeks ago, the New York Times used information given to them by a white supremacist and professional online bigot to attack Mamdani for checking the “wrong” box on a college application to Columbia University, where he did not get accepted. With its breathless coverage, the Times implied that the Ugandan-born mayoral candidate was attempting fraudulently to claim Black heritage.

Trump lies and mangles reality every time he opens his mouth, and the press just laughs it off. When he announced massive tariffs on non-U.S. films and refused to explain how it would work, CNBC called it a “typical Trump cliffhanger.” Politico’s Capitol bureau chief, Rachael Wade, reported gleefully that “Trump is at the top of his game” and “dominated Congress” after legislators passed his spending bill. 

That Trump didn’t know what was in the bill didn’t temper Wade’s congratulatory tone.

President Donald Trump keeps saying that Republicans’ mega tax and spending cut legislation will eliminate taxes on federal Social Security benefits.

It does not.

Journalism has long framed stories to protect those in power by using passive voice and thus absolving perps of responsibility: A cop shoots a person and it’s described as an “officer-involved shooting,” as though the officer could have been involved in any number of ways. Right-wing politicians attack someone and “a political firestorm erupted.” Marginalized groups often “clash” with police, implying a contest between equal opponents, even when the protestors are peaceful and the authorities are violent. 

But the contrast between the benefit of the doubt given to Trump and his administration, and the relentless skepticism directed at his critics, is glaring. He and his people are spoken of euphemistically: “racially charged rhetoric,” when he says racist things, or a “combative tone,” when he’s being verbally abusive.

Meanwhile patently true statements — that he is violating federal law and engaging in discrimination against entire groups of Americans — are qualified with “critics say” or “some Democrats believe.” 

Nowhere is this euphemistic tendency of the media more obvious than in immigration coverage. When immigration authorities round up and expel U.S. citizens and legal residents, local and national media describe it as “deportation,” the word Trump’s administrators use as a blanket for all immigration enforcement. 

Deportation is a specific legal process that implies that the subject has had due process —  that they’ve had a hearing in front of a judge to contest the deportation. Sweeping up random non-white people at bus stops and parks, at their jobs and at courthouses, and shoving them into unmarked vans for rendition to foreign prisons in countries with which they have no association, and depriving them of due process is not “deportation” — it’s kidnapping. 

Semantics are important, and legacy media is well aware. Yet they’re insistently capitulating to Trump and using his deliberately inaccurate terminology. 

The Trump administration opened a concentration camp earlier this month in the Florida Everglades, dubbing the atrocity “Alligator Alcatraz.”

News producers and headline writers followed suit, covering the prison’s opening as if it was a splashy new restaurant:

In a matter of days, workers have transformed the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport from an 11,000-foot runway into a temporary tent city that Trump toured on Tuesday. When completed, it will be able to house up to 3,000 migrants with the ability to add more capacity, an official said Tuesday.

The story went on about the facility’s costs and appearance for several more paragraphs before getting to the concerns of “immigrant rights activists,” namely that some of the “migrants” might be U.S. citizens or legal residents, and that none of them had been convicted of a crime. 

And local news is even worse, producing cheeky stories about the “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise that mocks the immigrants being imprisoned. According to the chairman of Florida’s chapter of the Republican Party, the merch — available online at at least two shops — is  “selling like hotcakes” and includes T-shirts, hats, Koozies, among other items. One online store is run by the state GOP; another is run by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who is offering buttons and bumper stickers.

It’s a struggle to imagine any other administration getting glowing coverage for celebrating immigrants’ detention, torture, and possible deaths, but the strutting cruelty of Trump has stood unchallenged for a decade. Institutional journalism seems more determined to obscure and excuse that cruelty than to oppose it with the kind of righteous intensity we know those institutions are capable of. 

The corporate media present a picture of normalcy in America, at stark odds with what’s happening every day. This country is a place where armed men on horseback storm a children’s soccer park, where federal authorities threaten to seize the country’s largest city if its citizens elect a Muslim mayor, where art and music are measured by their jingoistic worship of the national leader, where museums are purged and scientists fired for work the administration dislikes. 

You might see individual stories about one of those things if you watched TV news or read the nation’s largest newspapers. But you wouldn’t get the bigger picture, which is what those news organizations are meant to provide. 

We cannot expect the public to understand the danger Americans are in if the very people meant to be keeping them informed are keeping them in the dark.