Letâs start with the words âin the age of Trump.â The phrase currently has more than 17 million Google hits, compared to (and this should cheer POTUS) only 6.6 million for âin the age of Obama.â Itâs not just that Trump is the new name in town. Itâs that most of usâreds, blues, and media of all stripesâneed language to come to terms with what seems like a before-and-after split in reality. ââŚin the age of Trumpâ will continue to expand because so muchââclimate policy,â âtruth,â âbusiness ethics,â âempathy and education,â âfashion,â âCuba,â âapocalyptic thinking,â âjournalism,â to grab a few nouns from Googleâwill be affected one way or the other by this president.
Itâs a given that politicians distort language. Butâas writers from Masha Gessen to Roger Cohen suggestâby stripping words of meaning, Trump attempts to claim power over reality itself and take the necessary steps toward authoritarian rule.
The following is a glossary of terms that will no doubt grow in tandem with the presidentâs fits and fixations, and the worldâs response to them. First is Trumpspeak, the language that he and his wordsmiths have introduced or popularized, much of it since the inauguration. Next are the words of resistance, used to grasp and combat Trumpism, some working out better than others. Contributing to this second set of terms are voters, activists, progressive media, and, this time around, mainstream media, which the Trumpists have been trying to discredit as âfake newsâ and âthe opposition party.â
Trumpspeak
Alternative Facts: Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway coined an instant classic on Meet the Press two days after the inauguration. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, she said, wasnât telling falsehoods when he told at least four of them during his first press briefing, as Chuck Todd insisted he had. âDonât be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck,â said Conway. Spicer, she explained, was simply giving âalternative facts.â
The mockery was instant. Alternative facts, alternative universe. Alt facts, alt-right. Mating âalternativeâ with âfactsâ was so brazen that many minds jumped back to their high-school Orwell. In Newspeak, one writer reminded us, âwords with negative meanings were removed such that âbadâ became âungood.ââ
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Within days of Conwayâs coinage, 1984 shot to #1 on Amazonâs bestseller list. Conway has since called on networks to fire pundits whoâve âtalked smackâ about Donald Trump. Thatâs plain English, but from an alternative America.
American Carnage: Probably the most memorable phrase from Trumpâs inaugural address, âAmerican carnageâ is his justification for authoritarian solutions. Itâs Shock Doctrine 101, in which only strong-arm tactics can put an end to the crime, drugs, and failure to say âMerry Christmasâ that have characterized the Obama years. Both the inaugural speech and the avalanche of executive orders issued the first weekâincluding the disastrous, chaotic Muslim banâwere written by the White House power duo of Steve Bannon, Trumpâs chief strategist and former Breitbart CEO, and Stephen Miller, Trumpâs senior adviser for policy and former staffer for attorney-general nominee Jeff Sessions.
The Civilized World: âWe will reinforce old alliances. And form new ones and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism,â Trump said in the inaugural speech. We were supposed to get all goose-bumpy that, finally, a POTUS dared speak the magic words âradical Islamic terrorism.â But instead it was âthe civilized worldâ that some of us found so chilling. It suggests a crusade against barbarism and, considering the alt-rightish influence in the White House (see below), it hints at a white-racialist unification of the United States with Europe and Russia, which promises to crush Islam. And then we take their oilâalways a form of civilized behavior.
America First, Make America Great Again, Keep America Great: âAmerica first! America first!â Trump pounded the words in his inaugural speech. Much has been written about the precedent for the phrase, which was the slogan of Charles Lindbergh and the isolationist/Nazi-sympathizing movement. (See Philip Rothâs The Plot Against America.) Trump shrugged off the association, as he does history. Besides, âAmerica Firstâ reinforces âMake America Great Againâ and, soon, âKeep America Great!,â a slogan he trademarked (with and without the exclamation mark) last month for his 2020 campaign.
But âKeep America Greatâ has its own gruesome associations. It was the tagline for the summer 2016 horror movie The Purge: Election Year. ââThe Purgeâ movies,â HuffPostâs Bill Bradley points out, âare about one night a year when all crime is legal. You can murder, steal and even shoot a gun on Fifth Avenue without repercussion.â The slogan, one of the filmâs stars explained, was a deliberate troll of Trump.
Alt-right: Trumpâs people didnât coin the term âalt-right.â That would be Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who shouted âHail Trump! Hail our people!â to Nazi salutes at a confab last November, and who was punched in the face following the inauguration. But Trumpâs top man Steve Bannon did far more than Spencer (or his hip-sounding prefix) to inject âalt-rightâ into mainstream discourse. When Bannon headed up the far-right Breitbart News, he boasted that the site had built âthe platform for the alt-right.â Bannon is now bringing even more rabid Breitbarters to work in the White House. And by directing Trumpâs winning campaign, heâs made Breitbart and, by extension, the alt-right the popular kids in class. When Politico co-founder and Beltway poobah Mike Allen was trying to woo audience for his new Axios project last month, he genuflected before the site, telling Breitbart radio, âWe admire your coverage. We admire what Andrew Breitbart and his successors have built.â
Mainstream media outlets were a little slow to get âalt-right,â but some, like AP standards, have since spelled it out:
Avoid using the term generically and without definition, however, because it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supportersâ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
Literally, Not Seriously; Seriously, Not Literally: This wasnât coined by Trumpists either, but some of them, like Peter Thiel and Corey Lewandowski, ran with it. Itâs the most plausible positive reading of Trumpâs relationship to facts. âThe press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,â journalist Salena Zitoâs wrote in The Atlantic, in September. When Trump won, the nuanced dualism (a descendant of Karl Roveâs reality- vs. faith-based communities) became the wisdom du jour, and some of the more self-flagellating Beltway journalists found a way to frame their own failures; the subtext being that the press are a bunch of coastal, bubble-enclosed, bean counters, while Trumpâs people are on the side of poetic license⌠even of poetry.
Zito was right on âseriouslyâ: The press was largely blind, especially during the primaries, refusing to believe that the guy leading the polls could win.
But Trumpâs not the usual politician, or human. Now, sooner than anyone expected, Trump is acting very literally on his promises, on banning Muslims and trying to make Mexico pay for the wallâand the repercussions are seriously and literally threatening our democracy. Wait until we get to the literal blowback from repealing Obamacare.
Size: I guarantee you thereâs no problem, but President Trump has made size a national-security concern. Heâs not only obsessed with the size of his crowds and his popular vote (an investigation is expected to go forward to prove, against all evidence, that 3 million to 5 million âillegalsâ voted for Hillary). The obsession extends to anythingâratings, polls, his cabinetâs IQâthat can be slapped with a superlative, as biggest, best, worse, etc. What is wrong with this man? Maybe he is compensating for feelings that he isâŚ
Illegitimate: In boycotting the inauguration, Representative John Lewis said he didnât see Trump as a legitimate president, in part because the Russians helped âthis man get elected.â (He might have added in the Comey effect.) But itâs Trump who will forever be known for painting a president as illegitimate. And for reasons he completely pulled out of his ass. Starting around 2011, Donald Trump began performing racist theater, pretending to believe that the first black president was born in Kenya. It may be just deserts that the man who tried to delegitimize Obama will probably never be considered a fully legitimate president himself. But itâs not ironic. Itâs the almost mechanical result of his psychological projection: Trumpâs own sense of illegitimacy is what made him want to delegitimize Obama in the first place. As Trump biographer Michael DâAntonio writes, Trump is âall about shameâavoiding it himself, and inflicting it on others.â Heâll never be able to prove that heâs classy, famous, rich, smart, powerful, or big enough.
Press Secretary Spicer admitted as much. He was trying to both explain to the press and blame them for Trumpâs focus on crowd size. âItâs demoralizing,â he said. âItâs unbelievably frustrating when youâre continually told itâs not big enough, itâs not good enough, you canât win.â Bannon put it a little more roughly, telling the media to âkeep its mouth shut.â
Sad!: Given that our president is part snowflake, could his signature tweet sign-off be a cry for help? Nah. But âSad!â truly is the best word of all his best words. The faux sympathy. The pithy sarcasm. We in the opposition salute you, sir. And we cannot resist turning it on you now and then. Perhaps you think it Sad! that we appropriate it. Perhaps you think it free marketing. But itâs now ours, too, and it feels so good. Glad!
Terms of Resistance
President Bannon, Bannonâs Puppet: âPresident Bannonâ is winning the election as the phrase most likely to get under Trumpâs thin skin. Itâs suddenly everywhere, from #StopPresidentBannon to the New York Times editorial âPresident Bannon?â to âPresident Bannonâs Hugely Destructive First Week in Officeâ in Foreign Policy. Steve Bannon was already considered Trumpâs Svengali. But what really sealed Bannonâs presidency was the announcement that he, a simple political operative and one-time publisher of a racist, xenophobic website, would now have a permanent seat on the National Security Council, while the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be effectively demoted. Thus far, âPresident Bannonâ is beating out âBannonâs Puppetââperhaps because of confusion with âPutinâs Puppet.â
The Fiscal Times asks, âHow Long Can Trump Tolerate the âPresident Bannonâ Headlines?â Iâm going to guess, as long as they donât cross the border into his beloved cable showsâand here, Sean Hannity, Bill OâReilly, and maybe Joe Scarborough can protect him from having to hear those awful words. Although, maybe SNL will inaugurate a President Bannon.
Authoritarian, Autocrat, Fascist, Strongman: The first two words have come out of storage, not as labels for Trump himself (yet), but in their softer adjectival forms or as nouns for the societal systems he might create. In The Atlantic, never-Trumper David Frum details> the âautocracyâ we could be living under in 2021 as Trump enters his second term. CNNâs Brian Stelter has been tracking the spread of the word âauthoritarianismâ in the media and how journalists whoâve lived under such regimes see signs of it here now. Charles Koch warned his fellow rich conservatives that the nation could âgo the authoritarian routeâ (though he bets it wonât, not with his friend Mike Pence in the saddle).
Even âfascistâ is breaking through. You hear it, of course, in demonstrations and in âantifa,â short for the antifascist movement. Fascinating discussions thrive online over whether Trump is fascist. But on TV, the term has been muted. Thursday night, however, at an MSNBC town hall at American University, a student asked Senator Chris Murphy if heâd agree that Trump is âfascist.â While Murphy warned of grave threats to democracy under Trump, he said, âI donât know yet that Iâm ready to go to that word.â
Carl Bernstein is. In these must-see clips from CNN, heâs been explaining over the last year why he thinks Trump is a âneo-fascist.â Acknowledging that itâs a difficult term for Americans, Bernstein said, âthe word âneoâ is crucial, because it means new, and itâs a peculiarly American kind of fascism. And fascism is about a maximum leader, who is contemptuous of real democracyâof real democratic institutionsâcontemptuous of the press and a free press, who extols torture and violence, who incites hatreds.â
Bernstein cites It Canât Happen Here, Sinclair Lewisâs 1935 novel (now an Amazon bestseller), in which a populist Huey Longâtype rules the nation with an iron fist. The protagonist, a newspaper editor from Vermont, finds it hard to believe, at first, that âthe humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twainâ could produce a Hitler or a Mussolini. âIf there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe.â
Indeed, when todayâs media refer to âstrongmenââPutin, Erdogan, Duterte, the kind of brutes Trump seems to admireâthey are always safely ensconced far, far away. âStrongmanâ might seem like a sensible synonym for âdictator,â but letâs not even flirt with importing it. It will backfire. You can see Trumpâs tweet now: âFake news calls me a Strong Man. DUMMIES! Thatâs a good thing. Iâm a man & VERY strong. Not like weak Hillary. She has no stamina, none!â
Normalize: âNormalizeâ is one of those words about process, like âfalse equivalency,â that describes how media can reconfigure a nasty reality until itâs made to seem acceptable, or ignorable.
On inauguration night, Anderson Cooper mumbled,âWe donât want to normalize thisâŚâ when he handed his show over to full-screen coverage of musical numbers and inaugural balls, without so much as an inset of his CNN panelists. Even Fox didnât go so completely Dancing with the Stars. Since then, most on-air CNN news staff, including Cooper, have been on a sustained defense of journalism against Trumpâs attacks. But whenever a potential ratings bonanza arises, CNN goes for the wall-to-wall coverage, as theyâand MSNBCâdid by running Trump rallies nightly for weeks during the campaign. That was some Big Normalizing (and, across all media, $5 billion of free advertising).
Then thereâs Midsize Normalizing, like Mike Allenâs of Breitbart News (see âAlt-rightâ above). Or Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on any given morning, berating the rest of us for not giving Trump âa chance.â Or NBC and MSNBC handing prime real estate over to former Fox Newsâers Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susteren, respectively. Or ABCâs The View reportedly asking its hosts to go soft on Trump aide Omarosa Manigault in order to assure future bookings from the administration.
And nearly everyone in media, myself included, is guilty of Small Normalizing: cute-ifying Trump by calling him âThe Donaldâ or making lame jokes involving the words âyuge,â âyouâre fired!â or âhair.â Weâre desperate for comic relief. As Ryan Lizza warns in The New Yorker: âOne of the dangers in covering an abnormal Presidency is that journalists will constantly be on the lookout for signs of normalcy, and exaggerate and even celebrate them as proof that things arenât so unusual, after all.â
Falsehoods, Lies, Bullshit, Fuckery, Gaslighting: The man who pulled off the greatest grift of all time is skilled in all these techniques. And we can have fun debating whether Trump is more bullshit artist than liar.
But the pragmatic question for the news pages of the nonpartisan press is what to call it. They can barely utter âlies,â much less âbullshit.â In the great but way-too-late journalistic awakening, a few newspapers finally wrote of Trumpâs âbirther lie.â That came not when it might have done some goodâwhen he declared his presidential run or won the Republican nomination. It wasnât until September 16, 2016, when Trump admitted that Obama was born in the United States, that The New York Times referred to Trumpâs birther âlie.â The Los Angeles Times did so soon afterwards. The NY Times stepped up more quickly last week with this headline: âTrump Wonât Back Down From His Voting Fraud Lie. Here Are the Facts.â
Does it matter that the press uses the word âlieâ instead of, say, âfalsehood,â âunsupported fact,â âfalse claim,â âfib,â âwhopper,â or âspinâ? There are situations where any of these is appropriate. But âlie,â with its âintent to deceive,â has the potential to help us focus on the larger picture, beyond all the necessary fact-checking. Whatâs the larger picture? In discussing Trump and Putin, Masha Gessen writes, âLying is the message.â They both lie âblatantly, to assert power over truth itself.â [Gessenâs italics.]
Fake News: â[P]ut this tainted term out of its misery,â Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan advises journalists. âSimply stop using it.â Instead, she suggests, âcall a lie a lie. Call a hoax a hoax. Call a conspiracy theory by its rightful name.â
Thereâs a strong argument that the more pressing danger to the public weal isnât fake news but the right-wing mediaâs delegitimization of real news. And the future of journalism doesnât hinge on who owns the words âfake news.â In any case, you canât put it out of its miseryâitâs thriving happily as the âLock her up!â for the media-haters club, of which Trump is the president. Like the word âlie,â the press should keep using it when it applies. Donât forfeit language.
Love Trumps Hate: A mealy-mouthed, self-defeating, and utterly confusing anti-Trump slogan. The first two words: âLove Trumps.â Second two words: âTrumps Hate.â Message: âLove Trump! He trumps hate!â What a mess. Check out George Lakoff about inadvertently reinforcing messages youâre trying to defeat. Stop being a hippie.
Laughless: More and more people, from Al Franken to Chuck Todd, are noticing that Donald Trump doesnât laugh. Iâve posited that heâs too choked by self-deceit to get whatâs so funny, much less to really LOL. It may take a while, but eventually the whole world will also notice that the most powerful person in the universe doesnât laugh. And maybe they will say, in whatever language they speak, with real or faux sympathy, âSad, so sad!â