Let’s try an experiment. Here is a verbatim quote from a speech Donald Trump delivered at a rally on Long Island this week:
“Despite all of the persecution I’ve endured from the corrupt judicial system in New York – it’s a corrupt system – I love the people of the state and I want to give back. I want to give back to you, I’ve had a great life, I want to give back to you. We’re gonna give back to you, we’re gonna make this city and this state incredible again. Together we will rebuild our roads, bridges, highways and airports – they’ve falling apart, they’re falling down. We will renovate New York’s subway – oh, beautiful, I used to go to school in the subway. Can you believe it? I mean, I like to say it’s not so long ago, but it probably is, what do you think, Bruce? It probably is. My parents would drop me off at a subway and I’d go to Union Turnpike or I’d go to wherever I – they had no fear that I was going to be disappearing. They would take me to a subway, put me on and say “Bye, darling, bye!” If you do that today, you have about a 75-per-cent chance that you’ll never see your child again.”
If you had to write a news story using that quote, what would you go with? Donald Trump pledges to rebuild New York State infrastructure? Donald Trump offers plan for renewing NYC subway? Donald Trump reports three-quarters of subway-riding children never seen or heard from again? Would you verify that eye-popping child abduction rate with local authorities? Would you ask the Trump campaign for details on his infrastructure plan?
Over the last week or two, a critique has reared up about the media “sanewashing” Mr. Trump, by taking his increasingly unhinged ramblings, massaging them into something resembling rational adult thought and offering them up to audiences as though they accurately represent Mr. Trump, but in fact making him sound vastly more competent, coherent and thoughtful than he really is.
Critics of this tendency blame it on a horse-race-obsessed media trying to ensure both horses have a shot, or some promotional instinct toward Mr. Trump, or fear of being screamed at for bias, or mere incompetence.
But the simplest explanation for people fashioning thought-shaped objects out of what sluices from Donald Trump’s brain to his mouth and out into the world is this: what else are you supposed to do?
He says whatever he wants and he doesn’t mean anything he says, but here he is, a main character in the splashiest show on earth. There are policies to be debated and questions to be answered, so of course everyone tries to extract some semblance of coherent meaning from each bowl of mental alphabet soup he overturns on a lectern somewhere in America.
These charges of sanewashing are only the latest variation on the debates about how to handle Mr. Trump that have been wringing hands for as long as he’s been a force on the political stage.
In 2016, it was often arguments about “normalizing” him. The idea was that in trying to make sense of a candidate like Mr. Trump, the instinct was to buff off some of the crazy and slot him into a recognizable mental parking space pretty much like everyone else, when the whole point was that he is extremely not like anyone else.
In The Atlantic at the time, Salena Zito observed with razor-sharp clarity the problem with everyone trying to process Mr. Trump: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
During his run against Hillary Clinton, “But her emails!” became exasperated shorthand for false equivalency, or the tendency to treat his opponents’ misdeeds – such as Ms. Clinton using a private e-mail server for government business – as equivalent to his own in number, size or intent, when in reality, you’d need a bar graph the size of an airport tarmac if you wanted to plot the two sin piles on the same scale.
When Mr. Trump was president, the tormented conversation about how to deal with him was often about “deplatforming” him – when Twitter, Facebook and YouTube suspended his accounts in 2021 – taking away the bullhorns he was using to such destructive effect.
And through it all, there have been the constant debates on how to properly fact-check Mr. Trump – as though the perfect approach would force him to reform his ways, or cause the scales to fall from the eyes of those who swallow it all.
And there, I think, is the key to all of this arguing about the correct way to be a Trump tamer. It all rests on a bit of magical thinking with an obvious if/then proposition baked in: If someone asks the right question or offers the perfect rebuttal or precisely balances the scales in weighing a normal political candidate against a howlingly abnormal one, then … well, then what? He’ll stop lying? He’ll come up with serious plans for serious problems? He’ll stop behaving as though the world is his personal piggy bank? He’ll experience even the most rudimentary level of contrition for anything?
It’s been almost a decade now that people have been arguing about the right way to handle Mr. Trump, as though a magical incantation exists, somewhere, and if people just stop saying all the wrong things and mutter those words instead, the tangerine genie gets sucked back into the lamp.
The reality is that the system – politics, the media, adult society, any of the social norms by which the rest of us operate – just wasn’t built to contain a Donald Trump.
At some point as you age through life, you start to truly understand – rather than just hearing and repeating – the idea that you can’t control how other people behave, you can only shape your own response. In this situation, at least, that response belongs to people with some real clout: American voters.