Lawrence O’Donnell Rips NYT and Other Media for ‘Sane-Washing’ Trump’s ‘Crazy’ Statements

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell ripped into The New York Times and other media outlets he accused of “sane-washing” former President Donald Trump’s “crazy” statements.

On Monday evening, O’Donnell focused on a Times article about the debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and questions about Trump’s “age and capacity.”

“The elements of the news media that have been accused of sane-washing Donald Trump know that they are guilty of exactly that and now some of them, like The New York Times, they really, really are trying to do something about it, but this was their first try, so it’s not perfect,” O’Donnell said.

“Sane-washing,” O’Donnell explained, is when outlets “edit Donald Trump’s crazy statements down to a shape that allows them to then make sense of them.”

He accused the Times of sanewashing in that article after they printed a rambling response Trump gave in a speech to the Economic Club of New York in which he suggested tariffs could help provide government funding for childcare. The article pointed out Trump’s long answer after acknowledging that reprinting just portions “do not give the full picture of how baffling” Trump’s statements can be.

Trump’s childcare answer:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, somebody — we had Senator 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, that — because the childcare is childcare — there’s something, 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; but 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 childcare, that it’s going to take care — we’re going to have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country because I have to stay with childcare. I want to stay with childcare. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about — including growth — but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about “Make America Great Again.” We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you.

O’Donnell took multiple issues with the reporting, though, accusing the paper of allowing Trump to describe tariffs as “taxing foreign nations” with no pushback and pointing out that such taxes can often be pushed onto American consumers.

“In this article, The New York Times is trying to cure itself of its habit of sane-washing Donald Trump and in the very next passage after the one that I just read, The Times tries to sane-wash what Donald Trump said last week to the stupid rich people at the New York Economic Club who clapped enthusiastically for Donald Trump’s incoherent response to a question about child care, a response that was not an answer,” O’Donnell said.

The MSNBC host mocked the Times for saying Trump’s childcare answer simply offered a “disputable policy assumption.”

“A disputable policy assumption?” O’Donnell said. “That is the single most disturbing thing I have read in The New York Times about The New York Times.”

Watch above via MSNBC.