U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Paris Orly airport, following the G7 Summit, in Orly, France, June 17, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione. The polite translation is “idiot.” The translation that George Conway and half of social media reached for, and the one the paper plainly intended, is a good deal blunter than that and more dictionary accurate: “a--hole.”
What set the newspaper off wasn’t the war, or the self-dealing, or the cruelty toward immigrants: it was Trump’s lie about a photograph. He pathetically told an Italian network that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had “begged” him repeatedly for a picture at the G7 in Évian, that she’d wanted it so badly he “felt sorry for her” and went along.
Meloni, who until a week ago was Trump’s closest ally in Europe (and the only one who came to his inauguration), called the story “completely fabricated” and said neither she nor Italy ever begs. Her foreign minister cancelled his trip to Washington in protest.
And a conservative Italian newspaper looked at the most powerful man on Earth inventing a petty, humiliating story about a friendly head of state for no reason anyone could name but his own wretched, needy, emotionally-stunted ego and decided that therefore there was exactly one accurate word for him.
A newspaper in Milan, run by people who’d probably vote for him if they had the chance, will say in a banner headline what our own press, knowing far more about this man than they do, still treats as unspeakable.
So let’s do what our major papers won’t, and lay the record out in plain English:
— A jury in Manhattan found Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll, and the federal judge who presided, Lewis Kaplan, wrote in his own ruling that what the jury concluded Trump did amounts to “rape as ordinary people understand the word,” even if it didn’t fit New York’s narrow penal statute.
— We have him on tape, in his own voice, bragging that his fame lets him grab women. And continuously trash-talking female reporters.
— We have the Eric Trump Foundation, set up to raise money for children dying of cancer at St. Jude, quietly paying hundreds of thousands of those donated dollars to his father’s golf courses and steering more than half a million to other groups tied to Trump interests, while donors believed every dollar was going to sick kids.
— We have a “university” that wasn’t a university, shut down after he paid twenty-five million dollars to settle fraud claims from the students it fleeced.
— We have a memecoin he launched days before his inauguration that enriched his family and a handful of insiders by hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, even as the small-dollar believers who bought in on the strength of his name watched the thing collapse by more than ninety percent.
— And we have a shooting war against Iran that began in February, with American bombs and a dead Iranian Supreme Leader, that Congress never voted on and that the Brennan Center for Justice called flatly unconstitutional.
Every one of those facts has been reported, sourced, litigated, and confirmed, and they’re really just the tip of the corruption and criminality iceberg which also includes 34 felony convictions and the apparent sale of pardons. And yet pick up the average front page on any given morning and you’ll find the man at the center of all of it described as “controversial,” or “polarizing,” or “unconventional.”
You’ll read that he “made claims” or “stoked tensions” or “broke with norms.”
Press critic Margaret Sullivan and journalist Aaron Rupar gave this habit a name a couple of years back: they call it “sanewashing,” the steady translation of genuinely deranged, asinine conduct into the calm, gray vocabulary of normal politics, and the Columbia Journalism Review has documented how reporters keep reaching for euphemism precisely when the moment calls for the plain word.
Why do they do it?
— Part of it is the old religion of objectivity, the conviction that a serious reporter never uses a sharp word about a politician no matter what that politician does, as though neutrality between an arsonist and a fire department were the height of professionalism.
— Part of it is fear. Like Putin in his early days, Trump sues, and the corporations that own our biggest networks and newspapers would rather write him a check than fight him in court even when they’d likely win, and every settlement teaches the next editor to soften the next headline. Scholars who study democratic collapse have watched this dynamic up close, and they’ll tell you that newsrooms grow reluctant to use the accurate word for a man precisely as the accurate word becomes most necessary.
— And part of it tracks back a half-century to RNC Chairman Rich Bond telling Republicans to scream “liberal bias” every time a newspaper or reporter told a true story that reflected poorly on Republicans. “Work the refs” was his instruction.
I lived in Germany for a stretch in the 1980s, and one of the things I noticed reading the papers there was how brutally unafraid European journalists were to call a powerful person a fool or a liar to his face, in print, right there in the headline. It wasn’t recklessness. It was memory.
Germans of that generation knew exactly what happens when a press decides that the polite thing, the cautious thing, the access-preserving thing — as had happened there in the 1930s — is to keep describing a dangerous man in reasonable language, until the day comes when it’s too late to describe him any other way.
But today in America, a handful of giant corporations and right-wing billionaires have come to own most of what Americans read and watch, and that concentration now quietly shapes the boundaries of what those outlets will say about the powerful people they both report on and often fear.
The Italians still have a mainstream press scrappy enough, and independent enough, to call a spade a spade. We used to.
The Founders didn’t protect the press in the First Amendment so it could practice stenography. They gave it that protection so it would tell the country the truth, bluntly, when the powerful would rather it didn’t, and so it would be the thing that warned us before the danger arrived rather than after.
A free press that won’t name what’s in front of its own eyes isn’t being fair. It’s failing at the one job the Constitution set aside for it.