Word of the week: Sanewashing

Lather, rinse, repeat, appear normal.

Let’s say you’re a reporter at a major U.S. daily newspaper and you’re live-blogging a speech by a candidate for U.S. president. After the speech, the candidate is asked about legislation to make child care more affordable. Your job, as the reporter, is to summarize the candidate’s response, which begins like this:

Well, I would do that . . . We had Sen. 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 . . . child care is child care. 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, and they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.

Got all that? Marco Rubio? Ivanka? Numbers?

The candidate, of course, is Donald J. Trump; you can read and listen to his complete, verbatim response, delivered at a September 5 event hosted by the Economic Club of New York, here. It rambled on for another 290 words.

Here’s how New York Times reporter Michael Gold boiled it down:

After his speech, Donald Trump was asked how he might address rising child care costs. In a jumbled answer, he said he would prioritize legislation on the issue but offered no specifics and insisted that his other economic policies, including tariffs, would “take care” of child care. “As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”

Does “jumbled” do justice to Trump’s meanderings, or is Gold guilty of magicking the incoherence into clarity — of performing what one might call turd-polishing? Or, since the Times still thinks of itself as a family newspaper, sanewashing?

Eight years ago, we used an old word, normalization, to describe this sanitizing of repugnant or disjointed words and deeds. (Read my November 2016 post about normalization in the early Trump era.) Today the mot juste is sanewashing: portraying something as more rational — less insane — than it actually is.¹

Sanewashing cropped up frequently last week in social media, regular media, and Substack. It’s a handy one-word refutation of headlines like the AP’s “Trump Suggests Tariffs Can Help Solve Rising Child Care Costs in a Major Economic Speech” and of ledes like Politico’s “Donald Trump laid out a sweeping economic vision of lower taxes, higher tariffs and light-touch regulation in an address to executives on Wall Street, where some of his plans have been greeted with skepticism.”

Media and culture critic Parker Molloy, who writes The Present Age, called the press response to Trump’s “word salad” child-care response a case of “peak sanewashing.” She linked to her September 4 piece for The New Republic, headlined “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity”:

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.

Margaret Sullivan, a media critic and the Times’s former public editor, decried the practice of sanewashing as “media malfeasance.” Economist and Times columnist Paul Krugman tweeted a warning about “sanewashing” another Trump speech, delivered on September 7 in Wisconsin, in which the candidate threatened to impose “a 100 percent tariff” on countries that don’t use the dollar. Journalist Molly Jong-Fast amplified the word:

Molly Jong Fast, September 8, 2024: “Stop sanewashing this”

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Timely as it is, sanewashing isn’t new. Yes, some people are crediting independent journalist Aaron Rupar with coining the word, and at least one person credited Parker Molloy. But while they may indeed be responsible in large part for resurrecting the term, sanewashing has been circulating for nearly four years, in contexts having nothing to do with Trump or the media.

Urban Dictionary has an entry dated April 22, 2022: “Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public. This is often done by claiming that the radicals are taken out of context, don't truly represent the movement, or that opponents’ arguments about its severity are wrong.” The word, says author “admiralakbar1,” was coined “on the /r/neoliberal subreddit in late 2020 to describe progressives who misrepresent radical stances.”

The “radical stances” in question here, as far as I understand them, involved “Defund the Police,” a slogan that was popularized after the murder, in May 2020, of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer; and also “antiwork,” the name of another subreddit that tilted heavily toward anarchism. (Antiwork was an American Dialect Society nominee for Word of the Year for 2021. It received 6 percent of the vote.) Sanewashing entered the picture when the two concepts and what they represented became “gentrified,” as Trace Underwood put it in a February 2022 Medium story:

And do you know what happens when antiwork becomes cool?

Forbes writes thinkpieces about how “all they are asking for is a fair chance to find a decent job with the potential of advancing. They’d also like to be paid fairly and treated with dignity and respect”. The radicals who devoted years of effort to unpopular, extreme, often insane ideas are unceremoniously put out to pasture, and the millions who hopped on board to laugh at funny texts from mean bosses feel a shot of glorious vindication and move on with their lives. The concept is sanewashed away and the users gentrified out, creating a sort of Ship of Theseus effect where every bit of the group changes until it fits whatever more mainstream culture wants it to be.

[Emphasis added.]

The journalist and Substacker Matthew Yglesias, who has called himself a “neoliberal shill,” was hip to sanewashing even before then. Writing about “Defund the Police” in December 2020 (“Defund police is a bad idea, not a bad slogan”), he noted that the aim of the “defund” advocates was actually the abolition of police departments — a goal too extreme for many well-meaning liberals:

What drives me a little bit nuts about the liberal sanewashing of “defund police” into this idea about mental health services, is that while it’s true cities should provide better mental health services, that would not have helped George Floyd at all.

[Emphasis added.]

Or as University of Wisconsin sociology professor Andrew Austin put it in a February 2022 blog post:

Remember the call to “abolish/defund” the police? Sound crazy, right? Who will be in charge of public safety if we abolish the police? Sanewashers want to save the idea come in and clean it up. “We don’t really want to abolish or defund the police,” the sanewasher says. “What we really want is to reform policing.”

Sanewashing, wrote Austin, “is more widespread than you might think”:

Sanewashing and similar strategies have been a general trend in our society since the 1960s, at least in a big way. The term can be expanded to include rhetoric defining down deviance (what the defund the police tendency harbors at its core) and normalizing mental illness, to take two obvious examples. We also see it in campaigns to normalize obesity, cutting, and other extreme acts of self-harm. . . . So the desire to pursue a diet that makes one unhealthy is redefined in such a way as to portray the norm that stigmatizes that desire as discrimination rather than a check on self-destructive behavior.

UPDATE: My thanks to Ben Zimmer, who found an October 2007 citation for sanewashing. The rhetorician Dale Carrico used it in a blog post titled “Sanewashing Superlativity”:

Far more amusing than his denials and efforts at organizational sanewashing go, however, is his concluding admonishment of those -- oh, so few! -- transhumanists or Singularitarians who might be vulnerable to accusations of Superlativity.

(Please don’t ask me to translate that passage.)

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One final note on sanewashing: The word is built on the pattern of whitewashing, which was likely the original -washing compound, first (in the 1500s) in the literal sense — to wash a surface with a white substance — and, by the early 1700s, in the figurative sense of “to conceal something’s or someone’s faults or errors.” Lately we’ve seen a flourishing of compounds in which -washing acts as a libfix: smallwashing (positioning a brand to appear smaller than it is; thanks, Emily Sundberg!); sportswashing (laundering a reputation through sports); purpose-washing (hiding your company’s activities behind a stated “purpose” or mission; thanks, Mike Pope!); and the whole -washing rainbow (green, blue, red, pink), which I covered back in May.

If sanewashing is “washing something with sanity” and sandwashing (e.g., denim) is “washing something with sand,” why doesn’t dishwashing mean “covering something over with dishes”? Because dishwashing is more like brainwashing (which is said to be a translation of Chinese xǐ nǎo < xǐ to wash, cleanse + nǎo brain). That is, the dishes are being washed (with detergent); the brain is being washed (with propaganda).²

And how about hogwash? Back in the 1600s it meant “swill for pigs” containing food scraps and refuse: a liquid food — a wash — for hogs. Mark Twain may have been the first writer to use it in its figurative sense of “nonsense”: “I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is ‘hogwash.’” Merriam-Webster comments: “It is somewhat ironic that wash is a part of this word related to things in need of being cleaned up, whether its [sic!] scraps, bad food or drink, or insipid writing.”

Should the media be sanewashing a candidate’s hogwash? Discuss.

1. There’s a case to be made that Trump’s response wasn’t “word salad” at all. Lane Greene, The Economist’s language columnist and no fan of TFG, laid out a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument: “Trump’s speaking style is *unusually* prone to looking awful in transcription,” Greene wrote on Bluesky. “But he is also surprisingly effective in front of an audience. One thing you didn't see in the transcript? The applause. He’s a fraud. But underestimate him at your peril. We've tried that and it didn’t work out.”

2. Yes, I’ve seen The Manchurian Candidate. More than once.