Raw Story

President Donald Trump's rhetoric and ideas are being "sanewashed" by the mainstream media as they pull selective quotes from his speeches and mask otherwise obvious extremism, argued Jon Allsop for the Columbia Journalism Review.

"As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants — be they on social media or at in-person events — and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing," wrote Allsop.

Examples would include how some outlets paraphrased Trump's bizarre rant about child care and tariffs into something that, on the surface, sounded far more coherent than it was.

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These complaints about coverage of Trump are nothing new, noted Allsop — in fact, they have gone on for years. And moreover there are some reasonable defenses of the media's actions, including a reluctance to diagnose mental illness from the newsroom and a genuine need to inform voters what Trump's policymaking could look like, even if that means dressing it up more intelligently than he phrases things.

However, he wrote, "I find the sanewashing criticism persuasive, on the whole. Too often, major outlets clean up Trump’s language — especially in shorter formats, like headlines and ledes — to the point where it barely resembles what he actually said."

The real harm being done here, Allsop continued, is "not journalists’ failure to resolve an unresolvable debate about exposure, but their failure to accurately describe Trump’s rhetoric ... and to do so with due prominence." For example, Allsop previously criticized the press for taking seriously Republicans' defenses of Trump's claim at a rally that his defeat would mean a "bloodbath in the country," that he really just meant the auto industry would collapse.

Not only is this not what he said, Allsop wrote, but he also said a number of other violent or conspiratorial things in that same rally that didn't get any attention because the press let a debate over what "bloodbath" means suck up all the oxygen.

"Tomorrow night, viewers will get an unadulterated dose of Trump when they tune in for his debate against Harris on ABC," Allsop concluded. "Unavoidably, it’ll be all our jobs to describe what Trump said with the mics on."

Republican Party officials are increasingly worried as the Trump campaign's voter turnout operation in battleground states is vastly smaller and being built later than it needs to be, according to The Guardian.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, meanwhile, has spent weeks engaging in a ramp-up of hiring and opening campaign offices across the country.

The Republican National Committee was originally planning to open 90 offices around the country — but when former President Donald Trump pushed out longtime chair Ronna McDaniel and installed a new leadership team of loyalists that includes his own daughter-in-law, the plan was abandoned and the GOP strategy shifted to hiring a team of election observers, instead leaving voter turnout to other GOP organizations.

As a consequence, said the report, "The Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter — and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential."

The Trump campaign told The Guardian in response that it already has 350 staffers in battleground campaign offices — but by comparison, the Harris campaign has 375 staffers just in Pennsylvania, the battleground state widely considered most likely to decide the election.

Moreover, the outside GOP groups the Trump campaign was hoping to rely on for voter outreach, like Turnout for America, Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Elon Musk-backed America PAC, have only now begun to ramp up hiring, putting them in a time crunch to get properly organized for the main push of election season.

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The Trump campaign has now ramped up a program of its own called Trump Force 47, where volunteers receive "limited edition" MAGA hats and a list of 10 neighbors to focus efforts to get out the vote in return for merchandise. This strategy, which matches how the campaign secured wins in the primary, stands in contrast to the longstanding RNC strategy of using machine learning to target voters. Other GOP officials "have been wary of the program, sniping that they saw the volunteers as being as incentivized to rush through the process simply to get the hats."

GOP vice presidential candidate and Ohio Senator JD Vance is responsible for a "surge" of new Democratic Party donors and volunteers, the House minority whip said on Monday.

Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) was interviewed on CNN Monday morning by Kate Bolduan about the November election. During her interview, she talked about what voters "in purple, red and blue districts" thought about Vance.

"They don't trust JD Vance to order doughnuts. They certainly don't trust him to order American families on if, when and how they can have children. So we're seeing a surge of volunteers, a surge of first time donors, and we know that Kamala Harris is the underdog going into this, but momentum remains on her side," Clark said.

READ MORE: ‘Bullying Needs to Stop’ Says Ex-Beauty Pageant Winner After JD Vance Refuses to Apologize

The line about ordering doughnuts refers to an August stop by Vance to Holt's Sweet Shop in Valdosta, Georgia that was broadcast by C-SPAN and went viral. In the awkward clip, Vance ends up asking for "just whatever makes sense," instead of ordering a specific type of doughnut. Vance later expressed sympathy for the doughnut shop clerk who served him in an interview with NBC News.

“I just felt terrible for that woman,” Vance said. “We walked in, and there’s 20 Secret Service agents, and there’s 15 cameras, and she clearly had not been properly warned, and she was terrified, right? I just felt awful for her.

"We don’t want to have these scripted events — I don’t want to go and do three takes of buying Doritos at a Sheetz. I like to get out there and talk to people, and we want to make sure we’re doing it but definitely make sure that people are at least OK with being on camera, or we’re going to walk in and you’re going to have a person who has, practically, a panic attack because she’s got 15 cameras in her face.”

Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign has made headlines for the amount of funding it's raised. During August alone, her campaign raised three times more money than former President Donald Trump's campaign, according to the Guardian. And in July, at the very start of the Harris campaign, over 170,000 volunteers joined with her, according to Axios.

Current polling shows Harris and Trump in a dead heat. A New York Times poll published Monday shows Trump leading Harris by only 1%, with 48% of polled voters saying they'd pick the former president.

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A new report from Rolling Stone claims that former President Donald Trump wanted to use the United States Department of Justice to go after late-night comedians who made fun of him.

In a lengthy report on Trump's second-term ambitions, sources told the publication that Trump believed that comedians who mocked him on television were guilty of giving what amounted to illegal campaign contributions to Democrats.

"As president, Trump briefly attempted to get Justice officials to twist campaign finance laws and the federal equal-time rule to declare that anti-Trump material broadcast by Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others was somehow illegal," the publication writes.

"During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party — in the form of jokes and on-air satire."

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While career officials at the DOJ ignored these orders from Trump during his first term, the publication notes that they could actually become a reality should Trump win a second term given how much his allies have worked to weed out anyone who might be disloyal to his agenda.

“There are no guardrails,” Yale scholar Jason Stanley told Rolling Stone of Trump. “He already has control of any institutions that might stop him.”

J.D. Vance was recently photographed by TMZ swimming at a luxury resort with his t-shirt on, prompting laughter from the Republican vice presidential candidate's critics on social media.

Over the weekend, the celebrity news source published a report entitled, "J.D. Vance Beats Heat in S.D. Swimming Pool ... Wears Shirt Into Water."

"J.D. Vance is trying to beat the heat down in sunny San Diego ... jumping in a swimming pool -- but, don't think you're getting a glimpse at his bare torso," the outlet reported Saturday. "The Republican VP candidate went for a dip at The Lodge at Torrey Pines Saturday ... a luxury resort in La Jolla -- hopping in the pool with his shirt still on."

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Former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, "Weirdo wore his shirt in the pool."

Actor Bruno Amato replied, "....and for that we should be grateful."

Life coach Pete Quily chimed in:

"Wow. Pro Trump TMZ shows this. I know JD is very creepy and weird. But why does he keep escalating the weirdness? Does the far right extremist have far right tattoos he’s covering up?"

Ret. U.S. Army medic Molly Ploofkins also said the visual was "WEIRD."

"J.D. Vance, surrounded by Secret Service with the pool to himself, goes swimming with his shirt on at the luxury La Jolla Hotel," she added.

Comedian Jay Black said, "I mean, we ALL knew that JD Vance was a wear-his-shirt-in-the-pool guy, even before we knew it, like some Jungian imagery in our collective unconscious, right?"

Artist Art Candee said Sunday, "JD Vance isn’t beating those 'weird' allegations anytime soon for swimming in his t-shirt. He’s super weird."

See the images at TMZ here.

Vice President Kamala Harris is "going to fall flat on her face" at the presidential debate against Donald Trump, and she will also be on drugs, according to right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Jones, a Trump ally who in August claimed that there are Democrats plotting to put conservatives "in camps," predicted that Harris will be taking ecstasy due to her "performance anxiety."

"It's going to be spectacular in that she's going to fall flat on her face without a teleprompter," Jones said. "It's because she has serious performance anxiety."

ALSO READ: Buckle up: Win or lose, Trump promises potential scenarios of violence

Jones said, "She's going to be on drugs. She's going to be bombed out of her gourd."

Jones went on to insist Harris would be taking ecstasy.

"She looked like that at the DNC. Big pupils, feeling good. Yeah, they're going to give her a molly," Jones said on his show. "I'm dead serious."

He further claimed Harris was "drunk and on Xanax" at her CNN interview.

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