Every once in a while, Donald Trump tells the truth –– usually by accident. When he lambasted “the lamestream media” he had a point: the U.S. “legacy media” can be truly lame in what they stream to the public.
Most of the major U.S. media—including news, television, radio, and digital platforms—are controlled by a handful of very large corporations. As of 2025, the core group of companies overwhelmingly dominating the landscape typically numbers between 6 and 8, depending on the sector and the analysis.
So, it should be no surprise that when big media wants more and need government approval for mergers or licenses from the government, they bend to Trump’s will. Disney/ABC’s brief cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel is a case in point. (It’s not like he engaged in hate speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder; he made a remark about MAGA wanting to blame anyone but themselves for political violence. That’s kind of true, actually, as borne out by Steve Miller and J.D. Vance claiming that Democrats are domestic terrorists, as though no one on the political right could ever be, or has ever been, motivated to engage in political violence.). It’s a lot of loose, and dangerous talk, especially Steven Miller’s unhinged rants, sounding just like a minister of propaganda instead of a deputy chief of staff in the U.S.
His recent statements about Democrats being “domestic terrorists” and framing them as an existential threat closely mirror several propaganda tactics historically used by Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Miller’s rhetoric, especially at the Charlie Kirk memorial, used highly charged language like “wickedness,” “hatred,” and “nothingness” to dehumanize political opponents, casting them not as rival citizens, but as existential enemies of the nation. But his unhinged rants get extensive media coverage.
Speaking of unhinged rants, if you watched Trump’s petty, grievance filled oration at the U.N. General Assembly, you could be amazed that no U.S. media company called it like it actually was:Deranged! That was the actual headline in the U.K.’s Daily Mirror.
President Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly was a cover story for many international papers. The British media The Daily Mirrorcalls the speech “deranged”. It summarizes what the US president talked about for 56 long minutes – climate, migrants, Gaza, escalators, marble floors and teleprompters. French left-wing paper Libération had a strong headline that said, “Trump is pissing off the world.” It calls the speech “staggering”, “violent” and “incoherent”. Spanish dailyEl País believes Trump’s aim is to “blow up the rules of the international game”. Die Zeit agrees. The German magazine says that Trump’s accusations are “becoming crazier every minute.”
More recently, before assembled U.S. military brass at Quantico, Trump followed Pete Hesgeth with a speech that was characterized by generals and admirals as extremely unusual, with some calling it “deranged” or bordering on “outright insanity” in tone and substance. Several retired military leaders and media commentators described the speech as “bizarre, unsettling,” and said Trump sounded “exhausted, incoherent, and stupid,” with meandering thoughts and rabidly partisan remarks. But you didn’t hear that in the U.S. legacy media, except for MSNBC. It was reported in the U.K.’s Independent, an online newspaper and most European news sources.
So why does big media in the U.S. portray our POTUS as even semi-rational? Ryan Lizza explains it this way:
“One of the main ways in which the legacy media fails to cover Donald Trump accurately is the gulf between what an objective observer witnesses when the president speaks and how it is described in mainstream news publications.”
“A starting point for understanding Trump is that there is no relationship between the truth and what comes out of his mouth. Most people, even politicians, consciously anchor their words to some version of consensus reality in their head. They know when they are straying a bit too far into bullshitting and when they cross over into outright lying. Trump has no such anchor. His utterances sail freely between oceans of hyperbole, bullshit, and lies. When he occasionally arrives in a harbor of truth, it is merely by accident.”
“His total disdain for the truth is matched only by his disregard for the law and any ethical norms. Again, I don’t see this as debatable if you’ve been paying even cursory attention to his disregard for constitutional constraints and the almost cartoonish corruption of his crypto self-dealing and other schemes to use his office to enrich himself and his family.”
“But for reasons I still find difficult to understand, the mainstream media struggles to convey these obvious truths about the president. Accounts of his speeches—often insane ramblings studded with lies, non sequiturs, vicious personal attacks, and nonsensical policy prescriptions—are so swaddled in euphemism and journalistic jargon that these writeups transform Trump’s extremism into ho-hum rhetoric.”
“The effect is that mainstream coverage of Trump sanitizes his speeches—or “sanewashes” them, as The New Republic has called it—with reporters going out of their way to extract grand theories, notable policy proposals, or a coherent set of ideas buried in Trump’s remarks. This kind of bloodless coverage may have made sense in an era before the country was governed by an unhinged populist authoritarian who lies about everything.”
“To be fair, it is not easy to fully capture the firehose of craziness that spews forth during a long Trump speech, such as the president’s hourlong address to the U.N. General Assembly today in Manhattan. It is a lot easier for reporters who have seen the Trump act many, many times to sift through the bullshit and meandering asides and pick out a few headline-worthy news bites. But over time, this sane-washing process anesthetizes the public to Trump’s true nature.”
“The Wall Street Journal’s headline today was “Trump Says Migration and Climate-Change Policies Are Destroying the West,” which is true—he did indeed say that. But watch the speech or read the transcript, and you’ll be overwhelmed by the fact that nearly every paragraph includes nonsensical claims, provable lies, hilarious exaggerations, and rambling stories that would cause you to question the speaker’s mental competence if they came from anyone else.”
“This is not a Journal problem but a systemic media problem rooted in the way that Trump has picked the lock of traditional journalism by taking advantage of its norms and rules. At most of these institutions, it is fine to fact-check Trump and note some of the unusual aspects of the speech. But it is still taboo in most newsrooms to make more sweeping claims that provide the key context for the speech—and which every reporter privately knows to be true: that Trump almost always lies, that he knows next to nothing about policy, and that his basic project is to undermine American democracy and consolidate power in the hands of his far-right MAGA movement.”
So. Trump is indeed deranged, indeed, but pretending he is not? Well that is perfectly legal ––sanewashing! And if you thought the media was too gentle on Joe Biden, you are probably right; he was clearly losing it in the second half of his term, but there was no “legacy media” digging out the truth and pointing out Biden’s doddering, lapsing mind at any time before it was obvious to all of us: in his first debate with Trump. So, whether the emperor is going senile, is deranged, or has no clothes, a media that serves the public good should give citizens the unvarnished truth. Jeff Bezos, however, will certainly never allow the Washington Post to run a headline like the UK’s Mirror did: Deranged!
And Musk’s X, or Zuck’s Facebook, will make sure that the algorithm’s feeds don’t upset the MAGA faithful. Lucky for Trump, he knows how to play on the fears of billionaires that they might have to make a little less in the future, by threatening disapproval of licenses or mergers. Nothing to see here, folks, it’s all perfectly normal. And legal.