In Trump's Washington, a War of Wordplay Takes Hold

New York Times

11-02-2025

Political chaos, George Orwell once wrote, is connected with the decay of language.
In Washington, the current political chaos has been connected with a kind of rhetorical warping.
An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by President Trump and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak.
One presidential order titled 'Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government' calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled 'Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling' demands that 'patriotic education' be taught to children.
'Forced patriotism is indoctrination, those words are synonyms,' said Lee Rowland, a First Amendment attorney and the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to free speech. She said that the education executive order 'is a perfect encapsulation of what we are seeing out of this administration so far, which is to diminish rights, while claiming as a matter of pure rhetoric that they are increasing them.'
Across government, a war is being waged in wordplay. It is fought in executive orders, official statements from the White House, press briefings and all manner of communiqués, internal and external. The very language that Mr. Trump and his administration are using to smash the federal bureaucracy is now also the official language of that bureaucracy, because it is being dictated by the man doing the smashing.
'He's coming up with his own executive language which is then directed as a weapon against the supposed internal enemy, which is the structure of government,' said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor whose books include 'How Propaganda Works' and 'The Politics of Language.'
'All language is political,' he added, 'so all politics takes the form of war over language.'
The first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak. Even as the president signed an executive order titled 'Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,' he signed other orders policing language. The language of diversity initiatives was suddenly proscribed. So were words invoking what this administration refers to as 'gender ideology.' Out: 'undocumented.' In: 'alien.'
Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own. Entries included: Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression.
Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.
'The things they're attacking in these executive orders are sort of loose concepts,' said Jonathan Keeperman, the founder and editor of Passage Press, an independent publisher that is influential among conservative intellectuals. (Among pro-Trump fellow travelers he is more commonly known by his nom de plume, 'Lomez'). 'By focusing on these key terms that the left has grabbed on to,' Mr. Keeperman explained, 'you can, without knowing much else about what you're doing, at the scale of the entirety of the federal budget, basically remove a lot of the rot that you're trying to remove.'
This is exactly what critics of the administration fear it is doing. 'They're trying to take down the federal bureaucracy by saying it's all D.E.I.,' as Mr. Stanley put it.
Indeed, that phrase seems to have been given a metaphysical, almost magical quality by the president and his officials. They have lately blamed all manner of societal ills and events on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, even the American Airlines crash above the Potomac that killed 67 people last week. (The administration has offered no evidence suggesting that diversity initiatives had anything to do with the tragedy. Investigators are still assessing the cause of the collision.)
There have been all sorts of rhetorical wonders out of this White House already. Some seem semicomic (see: 'Gulf of America'); others, deadly serious: The president said he wanted to 'permanently' resettle Gazans. The following day, his press secretary opted for 'temporarily,' a word that means the exact opposite of the one her boss continues to use.
The president said he was appointing a 'warrior for free speech' to run the Federal Communications Commission. That free speech warrior immediately launched investigations into NPR and PBS, and then set his sights on CBS and NBC.
On Monday, Mr. Trump posted that he was installing one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, to run the Kennedy Center in Washington so that there would be no more 'ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA' put on at the performing arts venue.
Ms. Rowland allowed that 'the government does have a lot of leeway to set the tone and decide how to use its own voice.' Even still, she said, 'it is very clear that this administration is ushering in a new golden age of propaganda.'
On social media, Vice President JD Vance posted a 'memo to the press' explaining that the official definition of the word 'oligarchy' had changed and now meant 'when a president is thwarted by unelected bureaucrats.' Left unsaid: The world's richest man is working inside the administration as perhaps the most powerful unelected bureaucrat in American history.
And then there are the linguistic loop-de-loops so breathtaking they might impress even Orwell. The new 'Department of Government Efficiency' is killing off pieces of the government. When the president amplifies false conspiracies on the social media platform he owns — as he has been doing lately about U.S.A.I.D. — his posts are called 'truths.' On Sunday, while aboard Air Force One, he explained that the violent rioters he had pardoned for assaulting the seat of the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021, were themselves actually 'assaulted by our government.' He now refers to that date as 'a day of love.'
Mr. Trump has been fluent in the ways of doublespeak for decades. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Mr. Trump's first book, 'The Art of the Deal,' which was published in 1987, concocted the phrase 'truthful hyperbole' to describe his subject's speaking style. As the book states, in Mr. Trump's voice: 'I play to people's fantasies. … It's an innocent form of exaggeration — and it's a very effective form of promotion.' (Mr. Schwartz has said that Mr. Trump loved the phrase).
This has always been one of the more beguiling paradoxes about him. He manages to be both erratic communicator (see: 'the weave') and calculating rhetorician. His ability to coin phrases, or even co-opt ones used against him — like 'fake news' — was key to his political rise. Much of his phraseology has seeped deep into the culture by this point. And now his language is being spoken in the halls of power again.
'He just does it intuitively,' said Jeremy Clark, who was a senior official in the Interior Department during the first Trump administration and is now a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute. 'I think finally people on the left and right are understanding how smart Trump is, even if his strategy isn't always initially obvious to outsiders.'
As Mr. Keeperman put it: 'He's sort of a master at this.'