Bad ‘dudes’ and dumb deals – Trumpspeak decoded
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Version 0 of 1. It is too early to judge any improvement to the US itself, but Donald Trump has certainly made Twitter great again. Never before has a world leader communicated in such an effusive and unfiltered way directly to his adoring fans and further terrified millions. But what exactly does the president mean when he deploys the verbal weapons in his strangely childlike linguistic arsenal? Here is a handy guide to the topsy-turvy world of Trumpspeak. Bad: not what Donald Trump wants The president is evidently an adept of the Manichean philosophy, according to which the world is divided into the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Thus, anything that offends Trump attracts the one-word denunciation “Bad!”, such as the court ruling suspending his travel ban. “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!” Indeed, badness is a powerful force in its own right, as Trump declared: “If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the ‘bad’ would rush into our country during that week.” Here we may note, too, Trump’s creative use of scare quotes, “the ‘bad’”, for scary emphasis. He continues: “A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!” Bad dudes? Perhaps this was meant as a comforting reminder of George W Bush’s celebrated stand against “evil folks”. In any case, Trump’s ban is not bad because the point is only to stop the entry of “bad people (with bad intentions)”: at least bad people with good intentions, and good people with bad intentions, are still welcome in Trump’s America. Biased: not in complete agreement with Donald Trump Any organisation that criticises the president is, by definition, “biased”, and usually “totally biased”: in fact “biased” just means the same as “totally biased”, for in Trump’s universe nothing admits of shades of grey. Examples of totally biased groups include NBC News, CNN and Saturday Night Live. It is obvious that for someone whose intentions and actions are always perfectly virtuous, any possible demurral must stem from irrational prejudice. Bias is the opposite of even-handedness or fair treatment, hence also Trump’s constant descriptions of any bad publicity he attracts as “unfair”, most recently: “Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is ‘A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE.’ Very unfair!” Explaining away all challenge as “biased” or “unfair” is just one of the many ways in which the president has been deeply inspired by the rhetoric of small children. Deal: capitulation by negotiators other than Donald Trump Any “deal” not signed by the president himself is, of course, usually “bad” or “terrible” or “dumb” (qv), for instance, Obama’s nuclear accord with Iran, or his agreement to take refugees from Australia. (“I will study this dumb deal!” Trump promised, not explaining why it wouldn’t be a waste of time to study something dumb.) But the exclusive employment of the term “deal” – rather than “diplomatic agreement”, “accord” or “treaty” – reflects the president’s vision of international relations as a predatory business environment, a zero-sum game in which giving anything to the other side means you lose. It is surely reassuring to Americans, then, that his business career has been so stellar, including six company bankruptcies and current debts in the billions of dollars. Dishonest: not in complete agreement with Donald Trump This term is always applied whenever the president mentions the media – ie, “the dishonest media” (passim) – as well as to political opponents, including Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. If you are the perfect leader, of course, no criticism can be “honest”; it must stem from a wicked determination to spread lies. In this way, Trump turns all intellectual disagreement with him into inherent moral vice, a strategy that was not unknown to the most successful 20th-century despots. Dumb: not something Donald Trump approves of The president’s deployment of this word may look merely abusive – as with the “dumb deal” signed with Iran or Hillary Clinton’s “dumb answer about emails” – but, to his fans, the use of such previously unpresidential language is part of the attraction. To call things “dumb” is to adopt a pose of macho common sense, to call a spade a spade, just like any ordinary dude who has happened to win the presidency and stuff his administration with former employees of Goldman Sachs. Enjoy: this is flattering to Donald Trump When tweeting links to softball interviews with him on rightwing cable channels, the president is sure to add the narcissistic terminating imperative, “Enjoy!” What will happen if you watch and don’t enjoy is left chillingly unspecified. Failing: succeeding This epithet is always applied to the New York Times, just as “crooked” was always used for mentions of Hillary Clinton. “The failing @nytimes was forced to apologize to its subscribers for the poor reporting it did on my election win. Now they are worse!” The New York Times recently announced that its total of print and digital subscribers has soared to more than three million. Fake news: news that is not flattering to Donald Trump The president recently declared that “any negative polls” about his policies would be “fake news”. This is not exactly a new strategy for Republicans – it is reminiscent, for example, of the moment when George W Bush, interrogated by Trevor McDonald about pollution, blurted: “Well, I just beg to differ with every figure you’ve got.” But Trump’s version is more radical: an epistemological scorched-earth policy in which no information can be trusted except what issues from the pouting lips of the Dear Leader himself. As Garry Kasparov, the Russian democracy campaigner and former chess world champion, put it brilliantly: “As with most disinformation, the goal is to create doubt and deniability, to cast evidence as personal or partisan, a post-truth world.” In the president’s conceptual scheme, what is opposed to “fake news” is “the truth”, but you can’t handle the truth. Only Trump can. Great: under the permanent control of Donald Trump The president’s brilliantly vague campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” (great in what way? Make it that way how? What exactly is so bad about America right now? Don’t ask) still gets the occasional all-caps roll-out on his Twitter feed, along with its hashtagged acronym #MAGA. A clue as to what this might mean in practice was perhaps provided recently by the president’s threatening pledge: “I promise that our administration will ALWAYS have your back. We will ALWAYS be with you!” If his strategists can just find a way to strike down the 22nd Amendment to the US constitution, which limits presidents to two terms, that dream could become reality. Horrible: capable of spurring Donald Trump’s reassuring outrage What is horrible in Trumpworld? All kinds of things: “the horrible Iran deal”; “horrible terrorism”; “the horrible disaster known as Obamacare”; and the “horrible carnage” of the Chicago shootings. Many of these things don’t really require an epithet of disapproval, since most people agree that all terrorism and carnage are bad and have no non-horrible variants. So the use of “horrible” here functions instead as emotion-signalling, to indicate that the president has macho-appropriate feelings about horrible things and is therefore strongly motivated to prevent them. Even if that amounts to basically stopping anything at all occurring anywhere on planet Earth: “Look what is happening all over Europe and, indeed, the world – a horrible mess!” Over-rated: prominent, but not in complete agreement with Donald Trump If you are a public figure who does not support the president, you must be “over-rated” or even “highly over-rated”. Therefore Meryl Streep is “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood”, and “Crooked Hillary’s brainpower is highly over-rated”, and Republican Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is “overrated”, and NBC anchor Megyn Kelly is “highly overrated”. It is curious how this is Trump’s insult of choice for high-profile women in particular, but then the president’s extensive experience of running beauty pageants surely makes him well-placed to hand out appropriate ratings to all women. Sad: what makes Donald Trump happy A close cousin to “Bad!” (qv), “Sad!” is probably the favourite among admirers of the president’s climactic expostulations, because it encapsulates perfectly his weirdly emotional, bullying style. Most recently he described the Democrats as “All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad!” The paradox is that the president never seems more cheerful than when denouncing something as sad, finding as he does perhaps his only moments of authentic happiness in portraying the position of his enemies as pitiably hopeless. Sad! Smart: in agreement with Donald Trump As with “dumb” (qv), the president chooses to speak in the language of the people when congratulating others on their cleverness. “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!” But the choice of “smart” also demonstrates the limits of the president’s patience for purely intellectual matters. What he admires and calls “smart” is not dispassionate analysis of evidence or nuanced diplomatic thinking but a certain ratlike cunning, an ability to put one over on the loser at the other end of any deal (qv). Smart! So: very The little word “so”, used as a deliberately vague, emotive intensifer, has been a key feature of Trump’s rhetorical style since the beginning of the election campaign in which he promised to make Americans “so happy” by winning “so much”. Its use continues in recent statements that a pro-life march was “so important”, that the loss by the Democrats was “so big”, and that the coverage of the president in failing (qv) news outlets has been “so false and angry”. And the leak of the hacking intelligence report last month? How serious was that, exactly? “So serious!” For a man who always thinks bigly, it’s so useful. Compare and contrast with Trump’s use of the word “very” itself, when he tends to sound like a dishonest child who is protesting too much: “Thank you to Prime Minister of Australia for telling the truth about our very civil conversation that FAKE NEWS media lied about. Very nice.” Sure, sure. So-called: actual Trump recently inveighed against the Seattle federal judge who blocked his Muslim travel ban by calling Judge James L Robart a “so-called judge”. This is interesting in that Judge Robart is called a judge because he is, actually, a judge. Other things that Trump has called so-called include “so-called ‘Russian hacking’” (ie, Russian hacking) and “so-called ‘A’ list celebrities” (ie, A-list celebrities). The weaselly insinuation of “so-called”, seeking to smear the target with no further argument or evidence, is a marvellously adolescent tactic from the so-called president of the United States, and will surely be applauded by his so-called supporters. Sorry: not sorry The president says sorry surprisingly often, but uses it only in the passive-aggressive sense of “I’m not sorry at all, but I’m saying sorry in order to imply that you’re such a wuss that the facts hurt your feelings, you idiot.” Thus: “Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.” (Not sorry.) Or: “Our not very bright Vice President, Joe Biden, just stated that I wanted to ‘carpet bomb’ the enemy. Sorry Joe, that was Ted Cruz!” (Not sorry.) Or: “Sorry folks, but Bernie Sanders is exhausted, just can’t go on any longer. He is trying to dismiss the new e-mails and DNC disrespect. SAD!” (Not sorry. Not, of course, sad (qv) either.) Trouble: what will happen if Donald Trump does not get his way Disaster of an unspecified kind – “trouble” or “big trouble” – will always follow if the president is frustrated in any of his desires. Thus, before the election, Trump tweeted: “We need strong and super smart for our next leader – or trouble!” And more recently, on his travel ban: “When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot, come in & out, especially for reasons of safety & security – big trouble!” Perhaps the president identifies secretly with the hero of John Carpenter’s movie Big Trouble in Little China, who at one point confesses: “Sooner or later I rub everybody the wrong way.” In Trump’s case, as he has boasted, it’s usually sooner. Ungrateful: unwilling to do everything Donald Trump wants As with George W Bush’s America, you are either with Trump or you are against him. He has complained about the Iraq war with the curiously hurt-feelings description of it as “sacrificing our nation’s bravest for ungrateful Iraqis”. More recently, he described Chelsea Manning as an “ungrateful TRAITOR”, a revealing double-whammy. For since the president does not differentiate between personal loyalty and political rectitude, to be an ungrateful traitor is effectively to be traitorous twice over. Like King Lear, the president feels the fangs of ingratitude, the marble-hearted fiend, more keenly than anything else. To Trump, loyalty is everything, and the highest compliment is to be a “loyal friend” – to Donald Trump. If you are not loyal, you are automatically a traitor: in refusing to defend the travel ban, acting attorney general Sally Yates “betrayed” her department. Trump has also complained that the department store Macy’s was “disloyal” to him back in 2015 because it dropped his clothing line after he called Mexican immigrants rapists and killers, and he enjoys saying that his enemies (eg Clinton and Sanders) are “disloyal” to one another. On the other hand, those visiting him in Bedminster after the election, to be interviewed for possible roles in his administration, were, by definition, “patriots”. If you are on Trump’s side, you are a patriot; if not, you’re a traitor. L’état, c’est lui. |