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Late last month, the New York Times published a story with the headline: “McDonald’s, Pelosi, Debate Moderators: Trump Speech on Border Veers Off Course.” Trump, we were told, had walked into the lobby of Trump Tower with a binder from which he was going to deliver a speech about immigration policy, only to apparently “grow bored with the remarks” and drift off along tangents; per the Times, he “bootstrapped one thought onto another based on whether the words associated with something else, as opposed to having a clear through line.” One paragraph in the paper’s story quoted a hundred and forty words of rambling Trump commentary on San Francisco, where his opponent, Kamala Harris, launched her political career. Another noted Trump accusing Harris of lying about working at McDonald’s, which she says she did while she was in college. (There is no evidence that this is untrue.)
Yesterday, the off-course became the course: Trump visited a McDonald’s branch in Pennsylvania, where he donned an apron, shook some fries, and served them to customers at the drive-through. The appearance felt almost literally scripted (a photo of Trump waving from the drive-through window is perhaps the most AI-generated a real image has ever looked) and indeed had been carefully “stage-managed,” as the Washington Post put it in a headline: the McDonald’s was closed for Trump’s visit, and his “customers” were prescreened and got whatever food Trump handed them. At one point, Trump took questions from reporters through the window. As his aides urged him to wrap things up, he was heard to remark, “Wasn’t that a strange place to do a news conference?”
Observers in both parties and in the media seemed to agree that it was. A Republican strategist told the Associated Press that the visit was a “puzzling detour” that was “off topic” from the issues voters really care about, namely immigration and the economy; on MSNBC, Alex Witt asked the Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee, “What is the logic behind this?” and Lee replied that there wasn’t any. (Trump “appears to be not well and he’s engaged in some really bizarre activities during this campaign,” Lee added.) After the McDonald’s visit was over, Trump proceeded to a nearby town hall event where, per the Times, he gave “winding answers to soft questions” and “rambled through campaign talking points—some of them at times unrelated to what he was asked.”
All this capped a week in which major outlets noted that Trump had repeatedly gone “off-script,” showing “flashes of controversy and oddity” in ways that “have threatened to overshadow his closing arguments,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. Last Monday, a Trump event was interrupted by a pair of medical incidents; rather than restart his remarks, Trump bobbed to music for around half an hour. On Thursday, he spoke at the Al Smith Dinner, an event at which politicians typically yuk it up with self-deprecating jokes, getting a couple of those in but generally sounding “sharply partisan and mean-spirited,” as Politico put it; on Friday, Trump went on Fox and claimed (seemingly falsely) that network personalities had helped him with his jokes; on Saturday, he suggested that the late golfer Arnold Palmer had been, erm, endowed with impressive genitalia (thereby, perhaps, becoming the first politician to go off-script about a script and off-course about a guy who made his career playing on one). The Harris campaign is increasingly highlighting Trump’s off-message tendencies. His allies are wringing their hands about them.
In early September, I wrote about the growing criticism that the media was “sanewashing” Trump’s remarks—or the idea that major outlets too often highlight lines from his speeches that sound sensible in isolation but fail to convey the incoherent context in which they were delivered. Since I wrote, this line of criticism has persisted; over the weekend, a Times live blog entry that referred to Trump telling “Arnold Palmer golf stories” took some flak online. (“The media has an obligation to talk about Arnold Palmer’s dick now,” one such critic, the journalist Judd Legum, urged, in a sentence that was surely on no one’s 2024 bingo card. “People need to understand Trump’s state of mind.”)
When I last wrote about sanewashing, I said that I found the critique to be generally persuasive, if not universally true. A few weeks down the line, some of it is still doubtless going on. On the whole, though, I’ve observed an improvement in short-form media characterizations of Trump’s rambling incoherence on the stump and in other formats (even if identifying such trends in coverage is always a fraught process). The Times may have erred in referring to “Arnold Palmer golf stories” in its live-blog entry, but its longer story about the same speech opened quite sharply (“At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity”); the paper’s story on Trump’s “border speech” quoted his meandering remarks about San Francisco at unusual length. I also noted last month that major outlets hadn’t yet subjected Trump’s incoherence to the same white-hot scrutiny that followed President Biden’s debate performance in June (and ultimately led to his dropping out of the race). On this front, too, there have been recent improvements, including a computer-assisted Times analysis of Trump’s changing speech patterns.
To the extent that coverage is focusing more on Trump’s incoherence, that’s welcome. And yet the framing that sometimes accompanies it—that Trump is going off script or off message—is itself flawed; indeed, in a certain light, this, too, could be considered a subtle form of sanewashing. In some such moments, Trump appears literally to be deviating from prepared remarks, as with his border speech; it is, of course, truthful to point this out. It’s also fair to assess how much Trump is rambling now compared with earlier speeches given his advanced age (even if such coverage should, as ever, tread sensitively). But the broader framing that Trump is deviating from some elusive disciplined message can sometimes read as naive as to who he is and has been for his entire political career. It is also beside the point. With Trump, the real message is what he says without printed prompts—a message that, as I wrote last month, is plenty coherent, even if it floats on a sea of nonsense.
The media cliché of Trump going off message isn’t a new one: during his presidency, commentators sometimes sounded impressed when he managed to read from a teleprompter; the broader idea of message discipline is at least tangentially related to the cyclical punditry as to whether Trump might be adopting a new tone. We saw another round of such coverage over the summer, but it petered out as it became apparent that (surprise!) no pivot was incoming, at which point we saw a round of coverage channeling Trump aides and allies’ frustrations that he wouldn’t just stick to his campaign talking points. The views of the professional political operatives in Trump’s orbit are, certainly, worthy of coverage. At least some of this coverage, though, implied that Trump going off-script was the aberration rather than the norm and that he would do well to keep his head down and run a normal campaign, as if his deviation from political norms hasn’t always been central to his political appeal. (Similar could be said of the McDonald’s stunt, which—in its headline-grabbing, if ultimately substanceless showmanship—was pure Trump, not a puzzling detour. The fact that it went from distracting aside to formal event should be evidence enough of that.)
And, if Trump doesn’t always talk about golfers’ genitals, there is a clear script undergirding his campaign-trail digressions, one that repeatedly hammers the same dark talking points about election fraud, a lost country, and the need to take revenge on his rivals. Last week, he referred to Democrats as “the enemy within” and suggested that the military might need to move against them; twice since then, interviewers on Fox have given Trump the opportunity to back away from those remarks, and he has instead doubled down. Ultimately, what he is saying here is vastly more important than what his advisers would prefer him to be talking about. (And the allies gabbing to reporters that they wish he’d stay on message are being much more revealing about themselves than about Trump.) If coverage of Trump’s incoherence has gotten sharper of late, similar could also be said of his overtly authoritarian threats—a lot of journalists are taking them very seriously. But too much coverage is still wasting time on questions that matter only to the political-consultant class. Covering Trump honestly requires a laser focus on his rambling, yes, but also on what he’s promising in the midst of it.
If anything, when it comes to this latter task, it doesn’t really matter at all whether or not Trump is using prepared remarks. Recently, Politico’s Myah Ward watched twenty Trump rallies and concluded that his rhetoric around immigration has grown more and more extreme—and that this is “a core part of the former president’s closing argument.” At Trump Tower last month, long before he veered off toward San Francisco and McDonald’s, Trump looked down at his notes and assailed Harris for overseeing “the worst border crisis in the history of the world,” which has brought “untold suffering, misery, and death upon our land.” That’s the course.
Other notable stories:
- Over the weekend, Barak Ravid, of Axios, reported that a Telegram account supportive of the Iranian government had published what it claimed were top-secret US intelligence documents concerning Israeli preparations for an attack on Iran in retaliation for the latter country’s bombardment of Israel earlier this month. Axios could not confirm the authenticity of the documents, but US authorities did not dispute that they were real, and the Associated Press has since quoted an unnamed official describing them as apparently genuine. The administration is investigating “how the documents were obtained—including whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the U.S. intelligence community or obtained by another method, like a hack—and whether any other intelligence information was compromised,” per the AP.
- For CJR, Sheikh Sabiha Alam assessed where journalists stand in Bangladesh two months after major protests precipitated the fall of Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister. “By the end of July 2024, at least two hundred reporters had been injured while covering the demonstrations, and four had lost their lives. Attacks came from all sides—angry protesters, pro-government supporters, and law enforcement. Media buildings were vandalized,” Alam writes. The regime has now changed—with Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, taking over as head of an interim government—but “it remains an open question whether Bangladesh’s media can ever be free, or whether it will merely become a mouthpiece for power.”
- Last week, unidentified gunmen in the Mexican state of Sinaloa opened fire on the offices of El Debate, a newspaper that has extensively covered criminal violence in the region; the shooting damaged property, but no one was hurt. In related news, Netflix debuted Estado de Silencio, a documentary that, per the LA Times, “examines the experiences of four Mexican journalists to illustrate the parlous state of the press in Mexico.” And, in better regional press-freedom news, José Rubén Zamora, the founder of elPeriódico in Guatemala, was released from prison after more than two years—though he still faces charges and is now under house arrest.
- UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, is calling on Indigenous-led media organizations to take part in a global survey that will aim “to collect evidence on how Indigenous Peoples’ media operate, provide information and media services to a wide range of audiences, and collaborate with each other and with mainstream media in different regions of the world.” The deadline for the survey—which takes twenty minutes and can be completed in English, French, Spanish, Russian, or Portuguese—has been extended until October 31. You can find more details here.
- And Nicholas Daniloff—an American journalist who was arrested in the Soviet Union in the waning days of the Cold War after swapping some Stephen King novels for a packet of information, accused of espionage, then swapped out for a Soviet spy after fourteen days in jail—has died. He was eighty-nine. I wrote about Daniloff’s ordeal last year after the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was jailed in Russia on similar charges—a development that Daniloff viewed as history repeating itself.
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