Donald Trump is rendering language meaningless.
He is constantly contradicting himself and conjuring a reality at odds with verifiable facts—not just in impulsive tweets and incoherent, rambling off-the-cuff remarks, but in his just-delivered Inaugural Address. The lip-service that Trump paid to unity at the end of the speech is belied by his shameless use of nativist and bigoted language over the last 18 months, and by the barrage of insults he’s hurled at institutions—from the judiciary to the intelligence agencies to the press—and at individuals, including, most recently, the revered civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis. His defense of the “forgotten men and women”—a phrase reminiscent of the language that his adviser Steve Bannon has used—is belied by his selection of a Cabinet chock full of millionaires and billionaires and Goldman Sachs alums.
The speech itself was divisive and pointedly aimed at Trump’s base, pitting the people against the establishment, the heartland against Washington. It painted a darkly dystopian picture of a United States in decline (“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now”) and beset by violence that he promised to fix—a picture that stands in sharp contrast to the reality of a country in which crime is low by historical levels and the economy has been steadily growing, adding jobs for 75 straight months, the longest streak on record. Trump’s candidacy was predicated on breaking rules, and his Inaugural Address was no exception. There was no poetry in the speech—no soaring words, no invocation of the liberty and freedoms granted by the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, or the special qualities that have made America, as Ronald Reagan said, quoting John Winthrop, a shining “city upon a hill.”
Instead, Trump used the occasion of the Inaugural—traditionally an opportunity to bring the country together, to lift and inspire, to remind the country of its shared ideals and rededicate it to a common mission—to deliver a lumbering variation on his doom-and-gloom speech from last July’s Republican National Convention. It recalled the polarizing, red-meat stump speeches that he served up to rallies last year; the nihilistic passages in his books in which he describes the world as “a horrible place” where “lions kill for food, but people kill for sport”; and the apocalyptic worldview of Bannon, who has made a series of films depicting Western civilization under threat from foreigners and from rot within.
On the bright side, television commentators observed, there was nothing particularly incendiary in the address, and it was encouraging that Trump did not attack the press. But such observations only underscore how routinely inflammatory Trump’s language has been throughout the surreal 2016 campaign. His tweets, rally speeches, interviews, and news conferences have been less like any sort of traditional political discourse than raw, unedited, stream-of-consciousness riffs that teeter on the edge of incoherence—part Don Rickles, part George Wallace, part teenage boy in thrall to the emotions of anger and resentment, and his own unleashed id. Supporters and aides have suggested this will change when he’s in the White House, but then they also said he would become more presidential after the election. Yet the divisive put-downs and insults have continued, unabated through the transition.
From his years in reality television and branding the family name, Trump is accustomed to using words and theatrics to sell himself and grab attention. Exaggeration and sensationalism, he’s learned, sell hotel rooms, steaks and “university” courses. In fact, his default setting is that of showman and provocateur, while his default emotions, readers of his books have learned, are rage, vengefulness and vulgar braggadocio. His language and taste for hyperbole are not only devoid of diplomacy and nuance (“The whole world is blowing up”), but often meant to settle scores: “When somebody screws you,” he wrote in 2007, “you screw them back in spades.”
Many of the techniques Trump uses in his speeches are timeworn propaganda maneuvers, used by demagogues across the centuries: appealing to voters’ emotions, rather than their intellects; constantly repeating a handful of simplistic ideas in easy-to-remember phrases (“Make America Great Again,” “America First”); using us-versus-them formulations and coded (or not-so-coded) language about minorities and immigrants that play to audiences’ resentments and fears; relentlessly assailing “enemies” with memorable epithets (“Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted”).
If Trump’s favorite form of communication, Twitter, is emblematic of his own short attention span and appetite for the verbal punch-and-jab, it’s also a reminder of how uncannily adapted his use of language has been to our A.D.D., information-overloaded era in which the loudest, shrillest and most sensationalistic voices tend to be the ones heard above the din of data, and get the most clicks online, the most eyeballs on TV. His sowing of discord (for instance, against women, against Muslims, against Mexicans) reflects an increasingly polarized landscape in which technology has allowed people to retreat to narrow silos, talking only to like-minded folks; just as his willful contempt for facts (from questioning whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States to his claim that he watched “thousands and thousands of people” cheering in New Jersey, “when the World Trade Center came tumbling down” on 9/11) mirrors a cultural landscape in which subjectivity and fake news are ascendant. His supporter, the political commentator Scottie Nell Hughes, has gone so far as to declare that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”
Precise words, like facts, appear not to mean that much to Trump. He has said he sometimes fails to “choose the right words,” without apologizing for specific insults, or acknowledging that the content of his remarks might be offensive or utterly untrue. At times, he seems more focused on his performance than on the words issuing from his mouth. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate, Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control room to replay his appearance on a monitor—without sound: “He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.”
When it comes to Trump’s aides and supporters, they are often left scrambling to explain, rationalize or walk-back his more alarming statements, which can contradict previous remarks he or Cabinet members or Republican leaders have made. An adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who met with Trump after the election, said their delegation was told by people around the then president-elect: “We don’t have to take each word that Mr. Trump said publicly literally.”
In unscripted remarks, Trump’s blunt promises (about, say, building a wall) and boasts are often embedded, as small nuggets of verbal clarity, amid yards and yards of words, strung together in tortured syntax that is the bane of translators and transcribers. He has a taste for short punchy words (“Sad!”) and studies have variously ranked his talk at a third, fourth or sixth grade level. His sentences are stuffed full with shaggy-dog digressions, frequent narcissistic asides, false starts, odd qualifiers, and free associative ramblings.
When asked during the first debate with Hillary Clinton about the Iraq war, this was part of Trump’s answer: “The record shows that I’m right. When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very lightly, first time anyone’s asked me that, I said, very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows? Essentially. I then did an interview with Neil Cavuto. We talked about the economy is more important. I then spoke to Sean Hannity, which everybody refuses to call Sean Hannity. I had numerous conversations with Sean Hannity at Fox. And Sean Hannity said—and he called me the other day—and I spoke to him about it—he said you were totally against the war, because he was for the war.”
This incoherent “word salad,” as observers have called it, and its attendant ambiguity gives Trump a lot of room to maneuver—and gives Republican allies room to reinterpret and spin. It contributes to the chaos that frequently seems to swirl around Trump and his team, which, in turn, leads to confusion and outrage fatigue on the part of voters and the press.
In the case of foreign policy, in particular, such confusion can also have unforeseen consequences “We’re just operating in this world where you cannot believe the things he says,” said Eliot Cohen, a former official with the State Department in the George W. Bush administration. “It will have large consequences for our allies and our adversaries, and it’s going to greatly magnify the danger of miscalculation by all kinds of people.”
It’s a somber reminder, despite Team Trump’s cynical and transactional use of language, that words—and the precise use of words—do matter very much.
Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani