Join Robert Reich: Fight Election Disinformation!

There’s a new term catching on to describe how the mainstream media has normalized Donald Trump’s increasingly dangerous lies and extremism.

It’s called “sane-washing.”

Sane-washing occurs when the media takes a typically incoherent speech by Trump and makes him seem like he’s just another normal politician.

When, time after time, the media “sane-washes” Trump often incomprehensible stories or tries to explain what he “actually” meant, the resulting double standard is that Kamala Harris must be twice as good.

For example, while we watched Trump fly completely off the rails debating Kamala, spewing racist conspiracy theories about legal Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, the New York Times headline blithely offered a false equivalency: “Harris and Trump Bet on Their Own Sharply Contrasting Views of America.”

We’ve seen it over and over again. Trump will hold an event and spout unhinged nonsense for an hour or more -- and the corporate media will find some policy detail or brief moment of teleprompter-assisted lucidity and elevate that as the headline.

There are many examples, but here’s one more: At a recent event in Wisconsin, Trump made the preposterous claim that children are getting sex-change operations at school. He said,

“Can you imagine you’re a parent, and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this?”

No, we can’t imagine this, because nothing like this has ever happened! No school nurse has ever performed a gender-affirming surgery!

But how did Reuters report this absurdity? They ran it under this anodyne headline: “Trump Revs Up Small-Town Base in Wisconsin.”

For people who closely follow political news, they know how disconnected from reality headlines like this are. But unfortunately, the undecided voters who will decide this election tend not to follow politics closely, and this is especially true of young people.

We must fight this pernicious election disinformation and hold the media to account. 

Tell the networks, media and press to stop “sane-washing” Donald Trump by adding your name now!