We have a new derived word: sanewashing. Originally, it was coined in 2020 to make the “defund the police” war cry after the George Floyd murder seem to be a reasonable plan to promote social equity.

It has since evolved, almost universally, to be a description of the process that attempts to render TFG’s most outrageous false claims into being more socially acceptable.

Wiktionary has a good pair of definitions: “1. The practice of restating someone’s rhetoric to seem more palatable or acceptable.
2. Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.”

Sanewashing has become a necessary political tool that I equate to translations of Adolf Hitler’s speeches and writings: because German to English translators were scholarly people, their translations were also scholarly. In actuality, Hitler’s speech pattern had such a country bumpkin aspect to it that he appealed to the German masses, but was deplored by the aristocracy.

Sanewashing puts a finer point on the whole question of what makes a MAGAn be so MAGA, giving Bronzer Boy a much wider audience consisting of those who hear him speak, and those who see his speeches after being cleaned up for the gentler souls.

It’s a win-win for our country’s most famous con artist.