THE Sane washing is one of the untranslatable terms of American political jargon in the Trump era that dominates this surreal campaign.
If you’ve been following the Harris-Trump debate, you’ve noticed that Donald Trump often spouts meaningless word salad that mixes clichés, bits of reality (sometimes) and pure fiction (almost always).
This is true even in areas where the public persists in giving him a semblance of expertise, such as economics.
Normalizing the abnormal
Often, for the sake of balance and to normalize a discourse that goes beyond the framework of reason, reporters reformulate these statements to give them a meaning that they do not have.
So, for the average voter, a senseless speech acquires a semblance of structure. That’s it, the Sane washingWe find it just as much in the major American media as among certain analysts here who insist on giving Trumpism a veneer of legitimacy.
This is unhealthy for democracy and has nothing to do with the objectivity that should drive reporters and analysts. If a politician makes a speech that reveals his incompetence, his intellectual dishonesty or his ignorance, it must be said.
Trump and the Magic Tariffs
One crucial area for us where Trump constantly repeats consequential falsehoods and malapropisms is international trade.
In all his speeches on the subject, Trump repeats a falsehood that any CEGEP economics student should recognize: According to him, customs tariffs are paid by foreign countries and they rain wealth on the American economy.
This is ridiculous. Tariffs are paid by American importers and consumers, and the billions Trump boasts about getting from them are mostly used to offset the losses they cause to the economy.
The worst recent example of Sane washing came last week while Trump was speaking at the Economic Club of New York. When asked about the high cost of daycare, he gave a completely insane response that veered toward the rates “paid by the Chinese.” The New York Times presented this insanity as normal speech.
“Move over, uncle.”
The normal reaction to such nonsense should be to remind the near-octogenarian who utters it that perhaps he should not be leading the government of the world’s greatest economic power.
But Trump embodies in the eyes of the electorate the image of the businessman who is well-versed in economics and who shares his expertise with the country. This myth is hard to die, even if the mandates of the only three businessmen who became presidents (Hoover, Bush Jr. and Trump) ended in disaster.
Republicans failed to see these inconsistencies and suggest to the man who would become the oldest president in US history that he should give up on his return.
The media has made much of Joe Biden’s apparent cognitive decline before his allies convinced him to step aside. In Trump’s case, this obvious decline is accompanied by an ignorance and intellectual dishonesty that should disqualify him from the office he seeks. It is not a lack of objectivity to point this out, quite the contrary.
