The media’s weasel wording helps Trump

Here are 5 ways news outlets sugar-coat fascism with euphemisms.

Regular readers of this newsletter know I’ve speculated about the existence of a “euphemism desk” at the New York Times that sands off the sharp edges of Trumpism. Other news outlets are guilty of this weasel wording too, downplaying MAGA lies and criminality. I’ve broken down this trend into five categories:

1. On the edge of actually saying something

The NYT hates to report that Donald Trump is doing something wrong, preferring to say he’s nearly doing something wrong (when he is, in fact, doing something very wrong). For example, a headline last month: “Trump’s Plan to Accept Luxury Jet From Qatar Strains Bounds of Propriety.”

The regime’s abuse of power in sending National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles and threatening military occupations in other cities was translated in the NYT as “Trump Bends Military’s Role.” Other NYT stories have said he “tests the boundaries of the presidency” and have cited concerns that he was “flirting with lawless defiance of court orders.”

Flirting? Like, Trump and lawbreaking haven’t gone on a date yet?

2. Putting lipstick on lies

I wonder if the NYT euphemism desk has automated the task of removing the word “lie” from its news coverage. With rare exceptions, “lie” and “Trump” do not co-exist in its stories. Instead, he’s “untethered to truth” or “inverting the facts.” In NYT-speak, his lies become “unconfirmed accusations to suit his political narrative” or “a claim that is unsupported by evidence.”

A classic euphemism of this type appeared in 2023 when the NYT couldn’t bring itself to call Vivek Ramaswamy a liar in its main headline, so it said he “shows a penchant for dispensing with the facts.” The NYT described the flip-flopping of another 2024 Republican hopeful, Nikki Haley, as “an ability to massage her message to the moment.”

3. Making fascism fashionable

The normalization of corrupt and even treasonous behavior by Trump and his gang is accomplished through euphemism.

When the Washington Post reported on Trump’s call for “termination” of the Constitution in 2022, it watered down the news with a headline reading, “Trump’s ever-shifting relationship with the Constitution.” Likewise, instead of saying early this year that Trump abuses his authority, the NYT said he has an “expansive interpretation of presidential power.”

In a story last month about Trump illegally firing independent government watchdogs, the NYT headline said he “sidesteps laws.” As if the laws were blocking the sidewalk and Trump was merely trying to avoid a traffic jam.

CNN wrote about Trump’s pay-to-play presidency with a values-free headline saying he was “rewiring Washington access.” Similarly, the NYT wrote too politely that “the president, his immediate family, and entities in his orbit are unabashedly leveraging his position to accrue personal benefits.”

Last week, Trump forced the University of Virginia’s president to resign to satisfy federal investigators who were threatening UVa’s funding. The NYT lamely described this authoritarian strong-arming as “Trump’s success in harnessing the investigative powers of the federal government to accomplish his administration’s policy goals.”

4. Beautifying bonkers behavior

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer who is Health and Human Services secretary, has spread misconceptions about people with autism and falsely linked the condition to vaccines. Or, as NBC News soft-pedaled it recently, Kennedy has “raised the profile of autism.”

And speaking of vaccines, people who make the false link with autism are not “vaccine skeptics,” as the Washington Post puts it. They’re promoters of dangerous medical hoaxes.

Trump’s reckless foreign policy gets sanitized, too. Before taking office, Trump said he wanted to coerce Canada into becoming the 51st state and planned to seize control of Greenland and the Panama Canal – by force, if necessary. The NYT characterized Trump’s loose talk about acts of war as a “desire to expand the nation’s footprint.” CNN said it would be “a territorial extension.”

Trump’s bizarre public behavior gets noted in piecemeal fashion, with very few stories that bring it all together to reach the obvious conclusion that he’s mentally unfit. After a rally last October when Trump oddly swayed to music onstage for 39 minutes instead of speaking, the NYT called it an “improvisational departure.”

5. Hiding in the haze

The NYT’s fear of making strong points was demonstrated in 2023 after Trump reprised one of the Nazis’ favorite terms, “vermin,” to describe his opponents. The first version of the NYT’s headline was mind-blowingly opaque: “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction.”

In late May, an Associated Press story was headlined “White House acknowledges problems in RFK Jr.'s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ report.” “Problems”? The report cited studies that didn’t exist. The AP headline should have been specific about the fake studies instead of centering on a White House that acknowledged only “formatting issues.”

The NYT’s word choices sometimes seem designed to obscure. When the NYT reported that a Trump official tried to intimidate analysts into reaching an unfounded conclusion regarding Venezuela, the NYT said the official was suspected of “applying political pressure to generate a torqued narrative.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective “torqued” has about 0.04 occurrences per million words in modern written English.

The NYT shies away from calling Trump “authoritarian” in its news coverage, even though that would be accurate. The NYT prefers to say Trump has “a maximalist view of his powers.” A maximalist is someone “who advocates immediate and direct action to secure the whole of a program or set of goals.” That suggests Trump isn’t waiting around for anyone’s permission, which – when you’re president in a democracy – is authoritarian.

If I wanted to fit in with mainstream journalism, I’d say the media are selectively employing terms of nuanced value to impart non-confrontational messaging. In other words, they’re cowards hiding behind their euphemisms.

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