In their coverage of Trump’s appearance last week at The Economic Club of New York, the major broadcast evening news programs completely failed to inform viewers about the disgraced ex-president’s dangerously incoherent response to a simple question about child care policy.

There is a name for this type of sanitized coverage — “sanewashing” — and it’s a disservice to the public.

On September 5, Trump appeared at The Economic Club of New York for an event hosted by the group’s board and trustees. Over the course of more than an hour of often-confusing and disorganized remarks, Trump touched on various economic, tax, and trade policy talking points with a particular focus on making tariffs (taxes paid by consumers on imported goods) a centerpiece of his second term agenda. At the end of the event’s question and answer session, Trump was asked to name a “specific piece of legislation” he would champion as president “to make child care more affordable” and he proceeded to ramble for nearly 2 minutes.

Media Matters reviewed archived video and transcript of the September 5 and 6 editions of ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’ Evening News, and NBC’s Nightly News and found zero mentions of Trump’s incoherent answer when questioned about child care policy.

Broadcast news completely ignored Trump’s “gibberish” response, which the questioner — Economic Club trustee Reshma Saujani — described as “incomprehensible” and later said was proof that Trump is “not fit to be president.”

Rather than discussing any of this, each broadcast network on September 5 focused instead on Trump’s proposed agency tasked with government “efficiency” while dressing up the contours of Trump’s economic agenda:

• On ABC’s World News Tonight, Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club garnered only a few seconds of notice, with anchor David Muir and correspondent Rachel Scott focusing on Trump using the appearance to float his future “government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.”
• On CBS’ Evening News, correspondent Robert Costa outlined Trump’s scattershot second-term agenda of tax cuts, reduced regulations, and heavy tariffs on imported goods, but he made no mention of Trump’s rambling tariff-centric response when asked how he would address child care costs. CBS’ coverage also focused on Trump’s proposed “efficiency” agency.
• On NBC’s Nightly News, correspondent Vaughn Hillyard claimed Trump was “zeroing in on a top issue for voters: the economy,” and included video of Trump mocking Harris for purportedly “copying” his plan to cut taxes for tipped workers. After also discussing Trump’s proposed “efficiency agency,” NBC pivoted to another segment on the economy focused on Trump and Harris’ shared opposition to a foreign acquisition of U.S. Steel.

Viewers of broadcast evening news programs would have no idea that Trump’s disastrous appearance earlier that day in New York featured perplexing comments from end to end. Reporters didn’t just have Trump’s incoherent nonanswer on child care policy to choose from — as University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers pointed out, Trump’s response when asked about the fiscal impact of his proposals was equally incomprehensible.

Trump’s bizarre rant in New York was also unmentioned on the September 6 editions of each program on ABC, CBS, and NBC, even though a monthly jobs report published earlier that morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics might have given reporters a good hook to discuss Trump’s unintelligible views on the state of the economy.

And the problem wasn’t limited to broadcast news. The headline writers and reporters at several major mainstream news outlets still did their best to treat Trump’s inane responses on child care as if they were possibly serious proposals:

• Associated Press: “Trump suggests tariffs can help solve rising child care costs in a major economic speech”
• Politico: “Trump’s Wall Street pitch: Punishing tariffs, low taxes, ‘explosive’ growth”
• The New York Times: “Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers”
• The Wall Street Journal: “Trump Proposes 15% Tax Rate for Some Companies and a Role for Elon Musk in Government”

Trump’s wild tangent about tariffs and child care did not even register in The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of his meandering hour on stage, with the Journal bizarrely claiming “he largely stayed on message” during the event.

The Republican presidential nominee’s September 5 appearance was not an isolated example of Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior. In a September 4 column published in The New Republic, Parker Molloy pointed to sanitized mainstream news coverage just days earlier of a “rambling, insult-ladden, conspiracy-riddled wall of text” Trump had recently posted on his social media site:

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.

Some other reporters have flagged the issue, highlighting the Economic Club debacle.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes pointed out on September 6: “Everyone's grading Trump on a curve. He's always been rambling and incoherent, true, so he gets a pass."

And MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin argued, “If you didn't watch that with your own eyes and instead relied on legacy media outlets for the interpretation ... you might have been left with a totally different perspective.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik dug into Trump’s rambling discourse in a column detailing how the response was “even dumber, and scarier, than you might have imagined.”

And the reporting team at CNN noted that Trump “stops making much sense” throughout the rest of his remarks — though only after investing an enormous amount of effort trying to deconstruct what Trump was trying to talk about.

Some polling suggests that Trump is more trusted on the economy than Harris, perhaps because his complete inability to discuss economic policy specifics coherently has not been the focus of much reporting.

An honest assessment of what Trump said last week in New York — such as that provided by CNBC Squawk Box co-host Becky Quick, who was in attendance at the Economic Club — is that if Trump’s plan is really to fund universal child care with tariff revenue such a proposal is “crazy” and “inherently inflationary.”