"Innocent" Sanewashing, the Gish Gallop, and Bad-Faith Arguments from Republicans

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"Where do I even begin?"  I feel confident that almost everyone reading this column will have uttered that rhetorical question at least once, because we have all been faced with people who spew out a long series of crazy or objectionable statements that pile up so quickly as to leave the listener with the sense of helplessness captured in that plaintive response: Where do I even begin?

Before I get to Donald Trump (because that is obviously where this is going), it is useful to think about what it means to leave one's opponent with too much to say in too little time.  For those of us who participated in certain forms of competitive debating in school, "spreading" is the term for saying so much (usually by speed-talking in a timed speech) that one's opponent cannot possibly respond to everything.  Because all debaters learn that "silence means consent," the strategy by the spreader is to then spend their entire rebuttal speech listing the many arguments that their opponent failed to address.  "I win, because he didn't respond to x1, x2, ... xN."

Even when there is no formal time limit, people are too busy to stick with the conversation for as long as would be needed to get to it all.  As one example, I have a cousin who revels in this method of non-argument, slipping explosive statements into conversations that leave everyone around him annoyed (at best).  And when anyone tries to respond, he loads up his further responses with even more distractions and detritus.  It always ends in frustration, such that people roll their eyes and walk away, leaving him to say, "Oh, so you have no response?  Didn't think so!!"

This is, in other words, a variation on a filibuster.  Unsurprisingly, there is an academic term for the tactic: the Gish Gallop.  Wikipedia describes this as

a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

The term "Gish gallop" was coined in 1994 by the anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after the creationist Duane Gish, described by Scott as the technique's "most avid practitioner."
The Wikipedia entry goes on: "The difference in effort between making claims and refuting them is known as 'Brandolini's law,'[5] or informally 'the bullshit asymmetry principle.' A flood of dubious messages such as a Gish gallop is sometimes called 'the firehose of falsehood.'"

All of which brings us finally to Trump.  His firehose of lies is even more frustrating than most Gish gallops, because he constantly changes his story -- sometimes even mid-sentence -- and thus leaves a listener unsure whether it makes sense to correct something that Trump kinda-sorta already abandoned.  But because he can double back again at any time, it is all impossible to keep straight.  Even so, the world is such a ridiculous place that a Guardian story about now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year included this: "Another respondent [in a focus group] compared [Mamdani] in one respect to Donald Trump: 'There’s no flip-flopping.'"  Again, Trump cannot keep anything straight from moment to moment, changing his answers constantly.  But sure, no flip-flopping.

Again, however, the real story is the Gish gallop.  Even when Trump sits for interviews with mainstream journalists who might be capable of asking tough questions, he succeeds in fending off any serious inquiry by galloping away with the conversation.  Anyone who has watched him on, say, "Meet the Press" for even a few moments will have heard him say things like this: "Well, everyone knows the election was rigged.  You know it, everbody knows it, and I'm not going to allow illegals to steal American democracy and allow radical Democrat Marxist communists to laugh at this country while they eat our cats and dogs.  And that person who you just quoted, who is a very low-IQ person, hates America."

To repeat: Where would one even begin?  To me, the most frustrating part of that rant -- and to be clear, I wrote that not as a direct quote but as an example of how Trump loads up his answers -- is the "you know it, everybody knows it" casual lie.  Why is that so frustrating?  Because there is no way that any journalist is going to decide to respond to it, knowing that doing so not only inserts the journalist into the story (a big professional no-no) but prevents them from pursuing one of the other outright lies that Trump just spewed out.  Even so, it would be satisfying to hear some interviewer say, even once, that "I in fact don't know that the election was rigged, because it wasn't, and you can't get away with telling me what I and other people supposedly think."

Jennifer Rubin has been on a tear lately on the Contrarian substack regarding the mainstream media's failures in covering Trump, and she is obviously quite right to do so. What is especially infuriating is that the Big Media types are, as the Irish would say, up their own arses, completely self-satisfied and willing to give each other awards to convince themselves how great they all are. For example, Harper's last year held a gala celebrating itself for "175 years of fearless journalism and literary excellence."    (As a subscriber to Harper's -- I know, what am I doing? -- I received this notification in an email, which does not appear to have been reproduced online.)

Worse, they announced that the gala would "honor eminent figures in the fields of journalism and literature, including A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times."  Sulzberger has made some of the most ridiculous journalistic pronouncements imaginable in the Trump era, including: "I disagree ... that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality," even adding that it is "beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away."  Appropriately enough, the gala honoring The Times's current tosser-in-chief was supported by some of the BigLaw firms that abjectly caved to the Trump Administration back in early 2025.

Again, Rubin has made it clear that she no longer has any use for corporate media, and her columns are therefore essential reading.  Last Thursday, for example, she discussed the Media and Democracy Project's "27 media guidelines that aim to shore up independent, effective press coverage, and provide the sort of unvarnished, pro-democracy news that will be essential in this election and beyond."  These include:

  • Avoid “sanewashing.” Don’t normalize abnormal behavior, instead call it out.

  • Do not contribute to “democracy-washing,” when the reality is that American democracy is under siege and in jeopardy from an authoritarian movement.

This is all great, and I do wish that more news types would follow such advice.  Even so, I think that Rubin and others are ignoring the way that Trump's Gish galloping forces everyone -- even those of us who desperately try not to sanitize him -- to be involuntarily complicit in the sane-washing.  In a Dorf on Law column last week, I pulled a full quote from Trump's recent, disastrous speech in front of the United Nations.  As I pointed out, he riffed for 477 words about his silly effort to rebrand Artificial Intelligence as Super Intelligence, but the full quote included detours into immigration, global warming, and the "Russia, Russia, Russia hoax; the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax; climate change; open borders."  (Yes, that was a direct quote.)

I commented in that column that "[t]he term 'sundowning' has recently become a favored way to describe Trump's behavior, but one of the ways the media sanewashes him is that they simply are unwilling to devote the time or space needed to show what sundowning truly means in his case."  But I was in large measure being unfair there, because although it is literally true that the media is "unwilling" to expose his insanity, one can hardly blame them.  Those 477 words consumed more than three minutes of Trump's speech time, and the realities of nearly all visual media -- no matter how well meaning its practitioners might be -- make it impossible to do anything but pick the shortest clips and use them as examples.  But standing alone, the clips sound like English sentences, and they lack context and thus obscure the bigger picture.

On his show last night, Seth Meyers made the rare choice to air a full Trump rant.  (Video here, starting at the 5:35 mark.)  The topic was Trump's renewed attempt to prove that he is super-smart by mentioning his uncle who taught at MIT decades ago.  Meyers began: "Here's the transcript.  I'm going to read the entire answer, so we can all fully appreciate just how much of a genius the president is."  He then read from the transcript for 38 seconds, and it truly did have a stronger impact than if Meyers had simply quoted one or two extra-gonzo parts of what Trump said.

Even so, this is not a viable strategy for anyone.  Even print media can hardly include long quotations from Trump's ramblings.  (I all but apologized to readers last week when I included only a few hundred words.)  And because Trump's gallops are not only an "excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength" (to re-quote the Wikipedia description) but also circuses of digression, almost no one sees just how demented all of this is.

To be clear, it is possible to do better than most media are currently doing, as Rubin makes clear.  Still, no one can truly do it justice.  And that is ultimately because, although Trump is especially egregious about all of this, the ultimate problem is that Republicans stopped arguing in good faith -- including offering evasive answers to straightforward questions, such as their "Joe Biden was sworn in as President" rather than "Yes, Joe Biden won the 2020 election" -- making honest discussion impossible.  Not only with journalists, but with their political opponents and the American people.

This is, in other words, another way in which people without conscience "win."  They are more than willing to attack the questioner, change the topic, and Gish Gallop into the sunset.

- Neil H. Buchanan