Sunday, September 08, 2024

IN ADDITION TO "SANEWASHING," CAN WE TALK ABOUT "REALITY-WASHING"?

Donald Trump ranted and raved at a news conference on Friday, and didn't take a single question from reporters. After the news conference was over, Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times read a portion of Trump's remarks in a TikTok video:

@jamellebouie

yes i’m wearing a kikkoman baseball cap

♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse

Here's part of what Bouie read, from a transcript of Trump's remarks:
Let me talk about job numbers, because as you know, they just came out. And they’re a basic disaster.

They are really bad. You had numbers that are shocking. Native-born Americans, we lost 1.3 million jobs, while foreign-born Americans were able to take all of those jobs. So foreigners coming in illegally, largely illegally into our country, took the jobs of native-born Americans.

And I’ve been telling you that’s what’s going to happen, because we have millions and millions of people pouring into our country, many from prisons and jails and mental institutions and insane asylums, traffickers, human traffickers, women traffickers, sex traffickers, which, by the way, that’s the kind of thing that people should be looking at because it’s horrible. And it’s turning out that migrant crime is far worse than any crime that we’ve ever experienced. If you look at Aurora, Colorado, they’re taking over the place. They took over buildings, and this is just the beginning.

You haven’t seen anything yet. You haven’t seen anything. It’s allowed well over 20 million people, in my opinion. Other people say, well, it’s only 13.

No, no. It’s much more than 20. I think it’s much more than 20. Our country is being invaded because of incompetent people like Kamala that doesn’t want to do one interview.
On Threads, Bouie posted a link to his TikTok video, with this description:
i have been doing a thing on tiktok where i just read a straight transcript of what trump says just to emphasize how insane he sounds.
"Insane" is the word most Trump critics would use for this. It's an increasingly common complaint that the media is engaging in "sanewashing," as Parker Molloy put it in a New Republic piece a few days ago.

Maybe the media should be questioning Trump's mental fitness. But I see a different problem: not "sanewashing," but "reality-washing."

What Trump says here is not completely divorced from reality. I'm sure his numbers came from this Fox Business story:
The new August jobs report shows employment numbers of U.S.-born workers and foreign-born workers going on two very different trajectories.

Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the Department of Labor, shows native-born Americans lost more than 1.3 million jobs over the last 12 months, while foreign-born workers gained more than 1.2 million jobs.
There's a reason for that: The U.S. population is full of Baby Boomers who are retiring. As The Washington Post reported in July,
The ranks of retirees are growing much faster today than the number of new workers, ushering in an unprecedented graying of America that will reshape our workforce and economy.
Immigrants are helping to fill that gap -- and the BLS numbers didn't say they're exclusively undocumented immigrants, as even the Fox Business story acknowledges:
The figures do not differentiate between foreign-born workers who entered the country with authorization, i.e. Green Card holders and those with working visas, and those who entered without prior authorization.
But in Trump's telling, we're not seeing a lot of older native-born workers retiring faster while fewer young native-born citizens enter the workforce. His version is that native-born Americans are being forced out of jobs and nearly all of the replacement employees are undocumented immigrants, many of whom are criminals or severely mentally ill. Your jobs are being taken by border-crossing criminal psychopaths.

This should be a big story: Trump is making claims that are so divorced from reality that they describe an apocalypse, not actual American life. These aren't normal political lies. They're not even "truthful hyperbole ... an innocent form of exaggeration," which is how Trump's ghostwriter described his habitual truth-shading in his first book, The Art of the Deal.

Here's another masssive lie about immigrants, from Trump's rally in Wisconsin yesterday:


In addition to Trump's claim that there will be widespread seizures of American homes by undocumented immigrants during a Harris presidency, he also says in this clip that the undocumented population will rise to a preposterous 100 million.

And Trump repeated another recent extreme lie yesterday:


I still say Trump isn't crazy or suffering significant dementia. He's just beginning to realize that he can tell any lie, no matter how divorced from reality it is, and no one will say that his lies are categorically different from ordinary political lies. To the media, there's no difference between Trump saying schools are forcibly performing gender reassignment surgery on children and Tim Walz saying that he and his wife conceived their children using in vitro fertilization when they really used intra-uterine insemination. A lie is a lie! Nothing to see here, folks!

Maybe the press has a sense of futility about fact-checking Trump -- it's never stopped him from insisting that the 2020 election was rigged, so why bother? And fact checking clearly can't kill other Republican Big Lies -- that Democrats support abortion after birth, or that entire cities were burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests in 2020. (Many Republicans other than Trump tell these lies and get away with them.)

If we continue to let Trump lie this brazenly without making the sheer magnitude of the lies a story, we run the risk that he'll become president and indict enemies or call out troops on disfavored groups based entirely on fictional scenarios. Once that happens, the press might finally tell us that he's the worst-ever purveyor of Big Lies, but it could be too late by then.
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