Trump Kamala Harris debate
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Trump pushed replacement theory during the debate. Mainstream media fact checks sanitized it.

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published

As presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debated, Trump claimed that “illegal immigrants” are “coming in” while Democrats are “trying to get them to vote.” 

While some news outlets fact-checked the remark, The New York Times tepidly noted just that the conspiracy theory “lacks evidence,” and the Times and other outlets failed to highlight the extreme origins of the lie that Democrats are trying to replace white people with politically supportive nonwhite immigrants, otherwise known as the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. 

The failure to highlight this context is another instance of the media “sanewashing” Trump’s remarks.

  • Trump pushed replacement theory during the presidential debate

    • During the presidential debate Donald Trump claimed, “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” Trump made the remark in response to a question about whether he lost the 2020 election. [ABC, 9/10/24]
    • Claiming immigrants are being imported into America in order to vote in elections is a part of the white nationalist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” The theory alleges that nonwhite immigrants are “replacing” the votes of white Americans in order to undermine white interests, and that Democrats are supporting this effort. [Media Matters, 3/4/24]

  • Mainstream media failed to link Trump’s comments to the far-right conspiracy theory

    • The New York Times claimed Trump’s response “lacks evidence” and failed to mention his comment was an offshoot of “great replacement” beliefs, even though the paper has previously reported on the conspiracy theory. Instead, the Times focused only on the lie about noncitizen voting, writing, “In recent months, Trump and other Republicans have frequently made the false claim that there’s a major crisis of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections.” The Times had previously thoroughly reported on great replacement theory, and in particular former Fox host and Trump ally Tucker Carlson’s role in “stok[ing] white fear” and mainstreaming what the paper called a “racist conspiracy theory.” [The New York Times, 9/10/24, 4/30/22]
    • Other outlets also succeeded in calling out Trump’s lie about noncitizen voting but failed to highlight its link to replacement theory. NPR, The Washington Post, NBC News, and MSNBC all highlighted the slim likelihood of migrants voting in the election, but stopped short of highlighting the claim’s racist origins. [NPR, 9/11/24; The Washington Post, 9/11/24, 9/11/24; NBC News, 9/10/24; MSNBC, 9/11/24]
    • Some in mainstream media ignored the response altogether and did not mention it in their online fact checks. ABC News, CBS News, and CNN ignored the former president’s remarks on migrants voting. [ABC News, 9/11/24; CBS News, 9/11/24; CNN, 9/11/24]

  • This failure follows a broader trend of mainstream media “sanewashing” Trump’s comments

    • The New Republic argued that mainstream media have been sanitizing Trump’s comments by simplifying and laundering them to seem like more mainstream political statements. Parker Molloy (who previously worked at Media Matters) highlighted several instances of sanewashing, including CNN simplifying a Trump social media rant and The New York Times ignoring Trump’s comment supporting  Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s misinformation on autism and failing to report on Trump’s spread of anti-trans conspiracy theories. [The New Republic, 9/4/24]
    • Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop called the premise of sanewashing “persuasive” in his piece, titled “Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump?” Allsop also noted mainstream media are also downplaying Trump’s more violent and extreme comments on immigrant gangs and election misinformation: “If sanewashing the incoherent things Trump says is a problem, then so is failing to proportionately cover his all-too-coherent threats.” [Columbia Journalism Review, 9/9/24]
    • Many mainstream media outlets recently sanewashed a speech Trump made to The Economic Club of New York, failing to inform audiences about his incoherent response to a question about child care policy. [Media Matters, 9/10/24]
    • On MSNBC, Joy Reid highlighted the sanewashing impulses of the mainstream media, warning that Trump’s and Harris’s debate performances would be held to different standards. Reid: “His answers are sure to be sane-washed by much of the media immediately after the debate and in the days to come to ensure that he continues to be taken seriously by American voters.” [MSNBC, The Reid Out, 9/9/24]