As regular readers will know, I occasionally stray into politics in these blog post and give refuting creationism a rest for a day or two. They may also recall how, in August 2022 I warned that Donald Trump's self-evident narcissistic personality disorder should disqualify him from holding public office. I wrote similar articles in April 2024 and again in August of that year.
Now, most of Europe is watching bemused as America degenerates into warring factions over support for Donald Trump and the far-right extremism he advocates and the moderates in the Democrat Party and the few sane voices in Republicanism prepared to put their head above the parapet and risk their livelihood and even their lives, by criticising him.
Trump clearly depends on and enjoys being probably the most divisive American politician since the Civil War, but what bemuses us outside the USA the most is how he gets away with being so obviously a narcissist with an acute personality disorder who struggles to distinguish between fact and fantasy, and someone who struggles to understand even the simplest of evidence and can't utter a coherent sentence if ever he strays off script - which he does frequently.
The American press tore viciously into Joe Biden's declining physical and cognitive capacity during the early stages of the 2024 presidential election campaign, yet the evidence that Trump is going through obvious cognitive decline goes almost unnoticed in the American news media. For example, when asked, in September 2024 what he would do to make childcare affordable, he said:
He clearly had nothing to say on the issue and was struggling to find something sane to say.well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down – you know, I was somebody – we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter, Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about – because, look, childcare is childcare. It’s something – you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to – but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country […]
Again, as a rally in November, 2024, his obsession with the fictional character, Hanibal Lecter, surfaced, when he went off script and began to ramble incoherently with:
But the question is why do these public displays of narcissism and failing cognitive faculties bordering on, if not crossing completely into, insanity go almost unnoticed?When I say insane asylums, and then I say, Doctor Hannibal Lecter, does anybody know? They go crazy. They say, oh, he brings up these names out of— Well, that's genius. Right. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. There's nobody worse than him. Silence of the Lambs. Who the hell else would even remember that? I have a great memory, but they always hit me. I don't bring it up too much because they have to take such a— he brought up Hannibal Lecter. What does that have to do with this? What is it? It has everything to do with it, right? He was… So I've done something for you for you that I haven't done in 20 speeches. I brought up Doctor Hannibal Lecter and we're allowing him, you watch, you watch these fake people will say again, he brought up Hannibal Lecter has absolutely nothing to do. You know I do the weave, right? The weave. It's genius. You bring up Hannibal Lecter, you mention insane asylum. Hannibal Lecter. You go out, no. There'll be a time in life where the weave won't finish properly at the bottom and then we can talk. But right now it's pure genius …
Now a group of Australian researcher have analyses have shown how American journalists indulge in 'sanewashing' (making Trump look sane even when his public performances show otherwise), not through particular political bias, though that may be a factor, but in trying to write a coherent account of his policy statements and glean some sanity from his ramblings in order to do so. Many simply report on the scripts of the speech they were handed by the Trump’s press corp.
They have recently published their findings in the journal Media International Australia. Thee of the researchers, Stephen Harringto, Associate Professor, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology, Ella Chorazy, Senior Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology and Timothy Graham, Associate Professor in Digital Media, Queensland University of Technology, have also written about their findings in an article in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
The media has made Donald Trump look more coherent than he is. It’s called ‘sanewashing’
Stephen Harrington, Queensland University of Technology; Ella Chorazy, Queensland University of Technology, and Timothy Graham, Queensland University of Technology
On September 5 2024, after giving a speech about his economic plans for the United States, Donald Trump was asked what he would do, if re-elected president, to make childcare more affordable.
Trump then offered a nonsensical, 374-word response:
well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down – you know, I was somebody – we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter, Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about – because, look, childcare is childcare. It’s something – you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to – but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country […]Trump’s answer (or lack thereof) showed he had almost certainly not given the important topic any serious prior thought. His response also provided valuable insights into the scattered state of his own mind.
Yet, many of the subsequent news stories didn’t pay any attention to this massive fumble, and instead reported earnestly on the policy ideas put forward in the scripted parts of his speech.
The New York Times’ article about the event, for example, was headlined “Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk”. It made reference to his “jumbled and meandering answer” only once, and not until the 24th paragraph. For many frustrated observers, this was a prime example of what had come to be known as “sanewashing”.
What is ‘sanewashing’?
The term “sanewashing” has been used to describe the tendency of journalists – particularly when reporting on Trump – to focus their attention on the coherent and normal (or “sane”) parts of what he says, while ignoring his often weird, incoherent ramblings (about, for instance, the fictional movie character Hannibal Lecter). Many have argued that, in doing this, journalists are giving the wider public an inaccurate picture of who Trump is. They may even be inadvertently covering up his more extreme and dangerous ideas and whether he is fit to govern. The important context here, too, is that during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden had received intense scrutiny over his declining physical and mental capacities, which caused the then-president to drop out of the race in August that year.
Trump appears to be unraveling live on stage
— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) November 2, 2024
“When I say insane asylums, and then I say, Doctor Hannibal Lecter, does anybody know? They go crazy. They say, oh, he brings up these names out of— Well, that's genius. Right. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. There's nobody worse than him.… pic.twitter.com/Yyi4MuhR3N
Many felt Trump was just as cognitively unfit for office (if not moreso), but that was not clear to voters because journalists were sanewashing him, and making him seem more normal and “together” than he really was.
Some commentators even suggested this revealed an underlying “bias” among journalists, which was helping Trump to win the election.
But our groundbreaking research tells a more complicated story.
Sanewashing in the 2024 election
We decided to investigate whether journalists really had sanewashed Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
To do so, we focused our analysis around two speeches, the coverage of which had received a lot of attention for potential sanewashing.
One was the childcare example we mentioned earlier. The other was at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Trump made an off-colour remark about Arnold Palmer, which was widely interpreted as a reference to the size of the late golfer’s genitals.
We took the text of those two speeches, as well as hundreds of news articles that referenced them in the weeks that followed (from both traditional newspaper sources, as well as less-traditional online news outlets), and ran them through a series of computational analyses.
Our recently-published results show there is some evidence that sanewashing was occurring around both of these speeches.
We found reporters, on the whole, tended to focus on just one or two key topics Trump talked about, and did so via substantially different language than the now-president used.
But this didn’t occur consistently.
Journalists covering Trump’s economics speech tended to focus on exactly that: themes of taxation and government spending, and largely overlooked his failed answer on childcare.
On the other hand, when covering the Latrobe rally, journalists were much more inclined to discuss the comments about Palmer.
Perhaps not surprisingly, though, this was seen more frequently in online outlets, as compared to mainstream newspapers.
We also found, in spite of the media criticism, there was substantial meta-commentary on Trump’s incoherent speaking style.
Trump’s bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believed | Donald Trump | The Guardian https://t.co/A2A6dRBjSn
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 7, 2024
However, online news outlets tended to use more strident language when doing so (using words such as “weird” and “bizarre”), where traditional outlets typically opted for more neutral language (like “meandering” and “erratic”).
This would suggest that journalists working for outlets such as the New York Times may feel a stronger need to adhere to notions of impartiality, and thus may feel less able to call out the extraordinary aspects of Trump’s rhetoric.
Is this a problem?
A lingering question amid all of this is whether or not sanewashing is fundamentally problematic in the first place.
Obviously it’s important that journalists accurately reflect reality in their reporting.
But we also don’t want them to engage in stenography either, and just reprint everything a politician says word-for-word.
In practice, sanewashing may simply be an inevitable byproduct of journalism itself; of the natural process of filtering out information that is deemed less relevant, and focusing instead on what’s most important.
And, very often, journalists get those calls right.
To demonstrate this point, let’s return to the article we mentioned earlier: “Trump calls for an efficiency commission, an idea pushed by Elon Musk”.
The commission referenced in that headline was the agency that would later come to be known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and which would be responsible for – among other things – the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
That act alone has been forecast to result in as many as 14 million excess deaths worldwide, which is obviously much more significant than a failed answer on childcare.
So journalists do need to make sure they’re still drawing attention to Trump’s weird sidetracks, but not letting those distract from the more serious ideas buried underneath.
Stephen Harrington, Associate Professor, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology; Ella Chorazy, Senior Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, and Timothy Graham, Associate Professor in Digital Media, Queensland University of TechnologyThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
And so a significant number of Americans seem oblivious to the deteriorating mental faculties of their president as America lurches from crisis to crisis and world economies and the savings of billions of people worldwide are put at risk by an insane rambling on his private social medium 'Truth' Social which is the mouthpiece through which he lies to the world. But insane or not, he appears to be probably the most corrupt politician in American history. Reuters has reported that there is a pattern of massive, multi-billion-dollar trades (usually involving oil) that precede Trump's announcements. What has been established is that unusually large trades have repeatedly been made shortly before Trump announcements that caused major market movements:
- On 23 March 2026, traders sold oil and fuel futures with a notional value of about $2.2 billion shortly before Trump postponed threatened attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure. Oil subsequently fell by as much as 15%.
- On 7 April, approximately $2.12 billion in similar positions was placed minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire.
- Comparable trades occurred on 17 and 21 April immediately before announcements concerning the Strait of Hormuz and the ceasefire.
- When contracts of different maturities and related fuel products were included, Reuters calculated that these four groups of trades had a combined notional value of about $7 billion. The trades could have generated hundreds of millions in profits. Reuters investigation
These are not merely internet rumours. The CFTC is examining at least some of the trades, and the Justice Department has reportedly been investigating four traders associated with approximately $2.6 billion of them. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse also formally requested an investigation, noting that no public news appeared to explain the transactions immediately before the announcements.
Source: Reuters, Senate Banking Committee
Meanwhile Trump's son, Eric Trump acquired a substantial holding in XTEND, a company manufacturing and selling military drone to the Pentagon and Israel, 11 days before Trump and Israel attacked Iran. (Reuters)
Now we learn that the impetus behind the ludicrous plan to sell off the FIFA World Cup tournament was that the brother of Donald Trump's son-in-law, Joshua Kushner set up a private investment company, Thrive Eternal, shortly before FIFA president Gianni Infantino proposed selling shares in a FIFA company controlling the World Cup. The plan was that Joshua Kushner would become a major stakeholder in future World Cups. When Infantino gave in to pressure from world football associations and dropped the plan, Trump publicly intervened and warned that removing his close friend, Infantino from FIFA presidency would be 'a terrible mistake'. According to Reuters, there is now an investigation into how Joshua Kushner's company came to occupy such a privileged position.
Trump clearly still has the cognitive faculty to realise how his position is such a lucrative bankable asset.
If the democrats win control of both Houses in the Mid-terms, they should immediately begin moved to impeach Trump again and remove him from the office for which he is clearly unfit, if not on the grounds of insanity, then on the grounds of high crimes and misdemeanours and abusing his position for financial gain.
Trump makes Richard Nixon look like a paragon of virtue. At least Nixon was motivated only by remaining in the power to which he felt entitled; Trump is motivated by self-aggrandizement and massaging his own fragile ego.
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