Thank you, Mainstream Media

How Translation Journalism Made Madness Look Like Policy

During the 2024 campaign, America’s press corps failed America. Faced with a candidate babbling about lunacy, they did not call it nonsense. They sane-washed it. What should have been reported as incoherent, contradictory, or flatly false was repackaged as “policy signals” and “strategic messaging.” It was not journalism. It was laundering lunacy into legitimacy.

We all saw the pattern. Donald Trump riffed about low-flow toilets, shark–boat death matches, windmills assassinating whales, and his oddly affectionate locker-room recollection of Arnold Palmer. On each occurrence, the next day, respectable outlets explained that what he really meant was deregulation, energy reliability, or an authentic connection with the working class.

He floated the idea of “terminating” parts of the Constitution, and it was reframed as frustration with the courts. He vowed mass deportations, and it became “a tough stance on enforcement.” He praised strongmen and sneered at allies, and we were told it signaled a “realist shift.”

So why did newsrooms keep translating? Fear and incentives. Fear, because Trump promises revenge and has a history of attempting it. Incentives, in the Chuck Todd style of access-first, accountability-last journalism, along with the cult of “balance,” reward the illusion that every statement has a respectable core if you sand it long enough. Add in audience fatigue and outrage rationed like government cheese, and you get a newsroom reflex: tidy the mess, move on, never dwell on the pattern.

The Overton Window did not shift. It was dragged.

This “translation journalism” created a permission structure. If the New York Times or CNN could decode it, how crazy could it really be? The absurdity became background noise, like elevator music. Judges threatened? Institutions will hold. Wild constitutional claims? Process will prevail. Mass arrests? Strong rhetoric. Each episode “covered,” framed, and filed until the sheer accumulation started to feel ordinary.

And each time the media translated gibberish into policy, they quietly taught the public to accept the unacceptable.

Let us be clear. Trump is entirely responsible for what he says and does. The lies are his. The threats are his. The authoritarian fantasies are his. He chose them, he owns them, and history will hang them around his neck. But the media bears responsibility too. Not for his words, but for softening them, laundering them, and teaching the public to treat them as just another flavor of politics.

By decoding the incoherent ramblings of a man who clearly needed independent psychological interventions, reporters got to play diplomat, readers got to pretend there was a plan, and networks got the ratings bump of chaos without the moral weight of naming it. But the bill has come due.

Trump could not have arrived at this point without bad-faith assistance from established institutions translating his ravings into respectable English, all while sprinkling in the obligatory “but Joe Biden is old.” That is how democratic guardrails rot. Not with one spectacular crash, but with daily edits that convert nonsense into news you can use.

And that brings us to today. After years of laundering lies into strategy and madness into policy, the press pretends to rediscover outrage when Trump tries to strong-arm Disney into silencing Jimmy Kimmel. “Has he gone too far?” they ask, as though threats to judges, talk of “terminating” the Constitution, or mass-deportation schemes were not enough.

The line was not crossed with Jimmy Kimmel. It was erased long before. And it was the media itself that held the eraser.

By decoding, softening, and rewording Trump’s lunacy, they built a Rosetta Stone that translated bullshit into both-sidesing and manufactured outrage. Jimmy Kimmel isn’t the outrage. The outrage is that the press paved the runway for this flight.

America was betrayed by the Fourth Estate. Theirs is the only occupation directly protected in the Bill of Rights. They were supposed to be the watchdogs of democracy, but dog, they just watched.

I’m just saying.