Explaining the Sanewashing of Donald Trump
Why are so many folks trying to rationalize Trump's every utterance?
Last weekend the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World spoke at a Fletcher event in London. Afterwards, there was some breaking of bread with alumni attendees. The conversation flitted from topic to topic, but one moment stuck with me. One attendee was mostly silent throughout the lunch — but at one point she looked right at me and asked me her one and only one question:
“Why are so many people rationalizing what Donald Trump is saying?!”
Consider this newsletter my attempt at an answer. Because there are multiple reasons for the “sanewashing” of Trump’s ill-informed, meandering, occasionally bigoted statements.
First of all, I understand where this question is coming from, I really do. Hell, I wrote a whole book about Trump’s knowledge deficits, short attention span, oppositional thinking, and overall immature brand of leadership. It is probably accurate to say that Trump does not know what he is talking about when he is talking about Gaza, for example:
Trump has doubled and tripled down on the idea of U.S. ownership of Gaza — to the point where he has threatened to withhold aid from Jordan and Egypt unless they accept the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. As the New York Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Shawn McCreesh write, “That the president is willing to apply pressure to key allies in the region also indicates that he has little intention of backing away from his fast-hardening ideas about U.S. ownership of the war-torn territory and the displacement of Palestinians.”1
Before we get to the various rationalizations for what Trump is saying, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World wants to be clear that what Trump is proposing is God-awful on every dimension. Morally, he’s proposing an act of ethnic cleansing,2 the kind of behavior that prior administrations of both parties condemned. Practically, he’s proposing a policy that would further destabilize the Middle East (particularly Jordan), put U.S. troops in harms way, and increase the likelihood of additional terrorism striking U.S. shores.
In short, this is a dumbass idea. So why all the sanewashing?
There three distinct tribes that are currently rationalizing this particular batshit insane idea. First, there are Trump’s sycophants and media enablers of those sycophants. These are the anonymous White House jnsiders and White House reporters who rely on these insiders as sources.
Soon after Trump initially floated a Gaza takeover the White House walked it back — but in the process also defended Trump’s reasoning for floating the idea in the first place. For example, Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen served up the following rationales from Trump advisors:
"He's moving the goalposts of crazy," a longtime adviser told us. "This time around, he's not intimidated by headlines or pundits: He's gonna throw out there whatever he feels like throwing out there."
Trump's message to the Middle East, in the words of this adviser: "I can make it a lot worse for you guys, or you can come up with a better plan."….
Everyone on the inside knows it's Trump being Trump — feeling wholly confident, unrestrained, liberated to say and propose whatever pops into his mind….
A U.S. official said Trump presented the plan because he came to the conclusion that no one else had any new ideas for Gaza.
Similarly, Politico’s Eli Stokols and Dasha Burns reported on the White House walkback but then reported this out:
Another senior administration official given anonymity to discuss internal thinking said that Trump’s blunt statement that the U.S. would “own and be responsible” for a Gaza Strip that has been reduced to rubble by 15 months of Israeli bombing should be read more broadly as an expression of his determination to lead a rebuilding process that achieves a lasting peace….
“What ‘ownership’ looks like will be determined as we go through a process,” the person said. “But what’s most important is that he’s going to own the leadership position.”
Leavitt pitched the plan as an example of Trump’s “outside-the-box” thinking and a signal that he would make a regional peace deal.
Similarly, Mike Waltz, the president’s national security adviser, stressed that Trump’s proposal was part of a diplomatic process that’s just beginning and served notice that he intends to play a leading role in the Middle East. In an interview with CBS, Waltz said that Trump’s pitch might even spur other countries in the region to submit their own plans for rebuilding Gaza.
“The fact that nobody has a realistic solution, and he puts some very bold, fresh, new ideas out on the table, I don’t think should be criticized in any way,” Waltz said. “I think it’s going to bring the entire region to come up with their own solutions.”
This sort of sanewashing is the most amusing, because it is basically a variation of someone saying, “crazy… or crazy like a fox?!” It requires the person doing the sanewashing to constantly invoke business cliches like “outside the box” to convince their interlocutors that world politics can be solved using the same business principles that forced Trump to declare bankruptcy multiple times. It rests crucially on the logic of “surely things can’t get much worse, why not try this?” when the truth is that bad situations can always get worse.
The second category of sanewashers are Trump’s contrarian pundits and colleagues. These folks almost always start their political conversations with “I didn’t vote for Trump, but…” and then proceed to defend his strategic acumen for the next hour. In essence, this category of sanewashing works from backwards induction:
Trump was elected president twice despite doing and saying things that would have felled any mortal politician;
That is, in its own way, a remarkable achievement — maybe Trump knows something I don’t;
If Trump really is a political genius, everything he says — even the stuff that seems galactically stupid — should be considered an act of five-dimensional chess.
This leads to pundits writing columns that try to excavate deeper meanings behind Trump’s utterances. Even dumb statements from Trump can be reframed as “he’s just asking questions.” For the pundit, this has the added bonus of enraging and attracting sophisticated eyeballs by bravely declaring that Donald Trump is either right about something that everyone else thinks is rubbish, or asking the uncomfortable question that everyone else is too afraid to raise.
Sadanand Dhume’s Wall Street Journal column, “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” falls into this category of Trump sanewashing:
President Trump’s idea that the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and relocate two million Palestinians has elicited outrage and derision. But even if the idea never comes to fruition, it has this virtue: It puts a spotlight on the world’s double standard toward Israel.
Many population transfers have taken place over the past century. In the 1920s, Greece and Turkey agreed to a forced population swap: Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey moved to Greece, while Muslims in Greece moved to Turkey. After World War II, millions of Indians and Pakistanis were forced to find new homes, as were ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, Uganda expelled Indians. Only in the Palestinian case has the refugee question festered endlessly.
The discussion highlights a double standard. Following the creation of Israel in 1948 and the first Arab-Israeli war, some 600,000 to 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes. Yet the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East today supports nearly six million Palestinian “refugees.” That’s because the U.N. counts not only displaced Palestinians but also their descendants as refugees.
Taking Trump’s utterances seriously enables Dhume to make the argument he already wants to make — which is that the Palestinian refugee question is an outlier and Trump’s proposal reveals this fact.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World finds this explanation rather suspect. It obviously minimizes the trauma that all the 20th century forced migrations created. Furthermore, in all of the cases Dhume lists beyond Gaza, a war caused ethnicities to migrate to a country that housed that ethnicity. With Gaza, the issue is that there is no Palestinian state. My point, however, is that sanewashing is vital to sustain the premise that Trump is a secret political genius.
The final group of Trump sanewashers are policy advocates weaponizing Trump’s words to advance their own agenda. Remember, as I have written before, there are entire oceans of policy about which Trump neither knows nor cares:
There are whole vast territories of knowledge that has never interested Donald Trump. Trump telling RFK Jr. to “go wild on health,” for example, is a sign that Trump does not give a flying fig about health. It bores him. In these areas, Trump remains an inexperienced and uninformed president who mostly wants his underlings to display fealty to him…. Trump will care less about the specific policy and more about the loyalty that his subordinates will display to him.
This is the sanewashing that matters the most, because it leads to real-world consequences. Trump subordinates will be incentivized to implement policies they wanted to implement anyway by using Trump’s words as an intellectual pretext. Indeed, this move is a win-win: the subordinate can praise the Great Leader while executing their own policy agenda at the same time.
It is too early in Trump’s second term to see this form of sanewashing happen yet — But I fully expect a member of Trump’s cabinet to be deploying this gambit in the coming weeks and months.
That NYT story contains a few examples of what some might call the sanewashing tone used to describe Trump’s batshit insane ideas. For my money this is more about the Gray Lady’s house style than anything else but YMMV.
You’d think that a MAGA movement that is ostensibly rooted in nostalgic identity would not make the mistake of thinking that the Palestinians can be bought off of their ancestral lands. Logical consistency, however, has never been a prerequisite to be a rooting member of the MAGA.
The answer to the headline is simple isn’t it
People just can’t bring themselves to accept that the United States has chosen a complete lunatic to lead them and that one of its two major political parties has completely fallen in line.
One small thing that could be done would be for everyone to drop ‘leader of the free world’ as a descriptor for the American President. It is just a lie to use that phrase now and maybe, just maybe it would wake people up to the damage that has been done
I suppose we can add magical thinking too - people who simply can’t believe things could be this bad, so they convince themselves it’s not.
We can also generalize this sanewashing to describe the way the Republican Party is treated by the media and others. The same three mechanisms are in use. David Corn’s “American Psychosis” extensively documents the decades-long march by the GOP to become Trump/Musk ready.
Kevin Drum wrote this in 2018:
“….Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.”
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/08/nos-victi-reipublicae/