Let's Talk Inclusive Language: “Sanewashing” Trump
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“Help me explain the media’s sanewashing of Trump to my father? My dad thinks Trump’s behavior is no big deal and likes how he is a ‘bad boy,’ he’s not taking this seriously and it’s so upsetting.”
In 2016, Donald Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Trump was talking about the loyalty of his voter base, but he presaged a problem with American reporting on his words and actions.
Corporate media in the US frequently minimizes or glosses over Trump’s words and actions that would be seen as incredibly problematic — and candidacy-ending or presidency-ending — if produced by someone else.
This laundering of Trump’s words by corporate media, this shifting of focus away from and minimizing his incoherent, rambling, and inflammatory words by outlets like The New York Times, NPR, and Politico has been labeled sanewashing.
In particular, the press is accused of making Trump sound more normal, more coherent, more reasonable, more lucid than he actually is.
With sanewashing, the impression that a non-MAGA person gets from watching or hearing Trump speak is significantly different, and worse, than the same person would get if they were only reading headlines or watching news summaries.
Journalist Isabel Fattal wrote that reading coverage of Trump, she could “witness in real time the process of trying to impose sense where there is none.”
Here’s an example. A post-event tweet by Michael Gold of the New York Times reported on Trump’s actions at an October 19th rally:
Legum has highlighted “golf stories” because the “story” that grabbed the most attention was this, as reported by CBS news:
“This is a guy that was all man.” the former president said. “This man was strong and tough, and I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’
To laughter, Trump added, “I had to say it.”
Gold has folded in Trump’s remarks about the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitals, referred to as “unusual and vulgar” by CBS, as “golf stories.”
Politico described the same event by highlighting how Trump “appears energetic”:
Sanewashing is a specific kind of softening language, a linguistic distortion that I talk about all the time in my writing and in my work with clients.
During the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, early real-time reporting was filled with softening language, describing seditionists who were soon to hang the Vice President in effigy and break into government buildings in an attempt to murder elected officials as “protestors” and “dog lovers, like me.”
Softening language normalizes bad behavior. It says that someone’s unreasonable, inappropriate, or even dangerous behavior is acceptable.
I see softening language used all the time to excuse or hand-wave away the bad behavior of people with power. For example, harassment or discrimination by someone in a power position — which might be someone with political power, like a President, someone with organizational power, like an executive, or someone with social power, because they belong to dominant social groups (here in the US, white Christian men).
In the workplace, softening language is dangerous and harmful. It contributes to toxic and hostile workplaces, it drives away good employees, and it increases risk and legal liability.
The flip side of softening language is inflating language. This is another common distortion that is used to present reasonable behavior as unacceptable.
In the workplace, I see it all the time when people with less power speak with authority, express disagreement, or call out problems. “People with less power” includes people lower on the organizational chart, and, more commonly, people who belong to non-dominant social groups. In my work with clients to identify and root out damaging language, the most common targets I see in the US are women of color.
So it is no surprise to me when I see both softening language used for Trump and inflating language used for Harris, often in the same thumbnail or feed.
In this Reddit screenshot of an NPR news page, we see softening language and sanewashing of Trump, who “tried a friendlier pitch with Latino voters at a Univision town hall.” In the smaller text, which many people skimming will not read, we see the caveat that he “would not back off false claims about Haitian migrants eating pets.”
What is glossed over here is that in that same question and answer (starts at 24:47), Trump complained about immigrants who use interpreters. Directly to an immigrant who had just used an interpreter to ask him whether or not he truly believed that Haitian immigrants were eating pets.
Does the phrase “a friendly pitch” accurately reflect the reality of his answer?
Just below in the same newsfeed, NPR describes Harris as “testy” in an interview on Fox. Viewers of the interview would have seen bad-faith interviewing practices on the part of the Fox interviewer, including interruptions, talking over, and edited clips of Trump that were misleading.
After the interview, Newsweek used the loaded word “accusing” to report on Harris’s claim that Fox News had inappropriately edited the Trump clip they aired during the interview.
Here’s inflating language again — more accurate would be to describe Harris as “proving” that Fox had edited the clip to cut out the Trump remarks she had been referring to.
The full clip, which aired on Fox News, has Trump saying: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within...We have some very bad people, some sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Loaded and emotional words like testy or accusing are often leveled at women at work when they are behaving reasonably — and similar to their male colleagues. They are like the abrasive and aggressive and unlikeable and emotional and difficult that show up in women’s hiring committee discussions and promotion discussions and performance reviews. Inflating words that overlook their actual performance and frame their behavior as inappropriate and unacceptable.
The London-based publication The Times updated an October 13 headline about Harris after pushback on their inflating language. They moved from “shmoozed her way to the top” to the more neutral “worked,” and from “elbowed her way” to “charmed.”
On October 23rd, CNN commentator Van Jones described the double standards this way: “They’re not taking the same exam…He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless.”
To wrap it up:
The same patterns I see every day in the workplace are the patterns we are seeing in much of the corporate media reporting on Trump and Harris.
His wildly unacceptable, substandard, and incompetent behavior is edited, summarized, and represented as reasonable.
And her reasonable behavior and consistently highly competent performance is criticized and nitpicked to death.
Corporate media distortions present them as similar candidates, with comparable policies, comparable competencies, and comparable performances.
So there is a reason our reader’s father feels the way that he does. He has had a lifetime of these distortions that have set him up with biased mental models and biased decision making.
The same biased judgments and decisions that affect our politics affect our workplaces.
I will end by saying that inclusive language is optimized language. And the foundation of all optimized language is that it is accurate and reflects reality.
So when you are being presented with a summary assessment of a person’s behavior, it’s worth it to take the time to check things out for yourself.
If you know how to identify softening and inflating language, you can correct those distortions and improve the quality of your own judgements and decisions.
Industry-leading inclusive language expert Suzanne Wertheim facilitates in-person and virtual inclusive language trainings, as well as offering empowering and educational inclusive language keynotes.
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