Lindy West - 100 days of gibberish – Trump has weaponised nonsense
The Trump White House approaches language
with the same roughshod entitlement he’s applying to the presidency. His sloppy
lies and vague promises must not stop us holding him to account.. If Trump never makes a statement of commitment, Trump supporters never have to confront what they really voted for
With only a week left
of his first 100 days in office – traditionally a milestone for American
presidents – Donald Trump sat down with the Associated Press to reflect on his
accomplishments (sic) and preemptively brag about future ones. This remarkable
artefact, a
transcript of which AP then released in full, captures, more than any other
piece of media (except perhaps Trump’s Twitter feed), the
unifying ethos of the Trump White House: weaponised nonsense.
The interview is deep,
pure, tangy, umami Trump.
I felt like I was reading one of those children’s stories in which a villain’s
soul is written into a book and imprisoned there for ever – only without, in America’s
case, such a happy ending. Donald
Trump remains in the Oval Office, making decisions about whom to
explode next (in the interview he calls this responsibility “the bigness of it
all”), not gathering dust on a sorcerer’s shelf. Bad! (Not good.)
Trump lies
relentlessly about his achievements (claiming, for example, that he’s “mostly
there” on his 100-day plan, despite appearing not to know what it is), admits
he “never realised” how big a job it is to be president, forgets how many
missiles he fired at Syria, even though he got the number right only 17 words
earlier, and compares his TV ratings favourably to those for 9/11. In my second
favourite moment in the interview – the first being when he inexplicably drops
the word “hamlets” – Trump describes a meeting with Democratic congressman Elijah
Cummings:
“Well he said, you’ll
be the greatest president in the history of, but you know what, I’ll take that
also, but that you could be. But he said, will be the greatest president but I
would also accept the other. In other words, if you do your job, but I accept
that. Then I watched him interviewed and it was like he never even was here.
It’s incredible. I watched him interviewed a week later and it’s like he was
never in my office. And you can even say that.”
Cummings remembers the
exchange differently, explaining that he told Trump he “could be” a great
president if he stopped doing literally everything that he was doing and
started doing other stuff that wasn’t horrible instead. Sixteen times during
the interview, which took place in the Oval Office, Trump’s speech is recorded
as “unintelligible”, either because he was mumbling like a weirdo or because an
aide was talking over him and didn’t want to be quoted in the interview – both
of which, the Toronto Star notes, are “highly unusual”. Highly unusual is our
normal now.
Whether or not Trump
is capable of calculation (and, judging by his largely noun-free syntax in this
interview, it’s debatable), his rhetorical style, untethered from both meaning
and reality, serves his agenda well. Language is where
we find common ground, where we define ourselves and teach others how to treat
us, where we name problems so we can see and fight them. There’s a reason why
social justice movements care about things such as pronouns and racial slurs
and calling a Nazi a Nazi and saying “abortion” out loud – it’s the same reason
why rightwingers, Trumpists in particular, are so eager to cast language as a
frivolous abstraction and any critique as “political correctness”.
Without language,
there is no accountability, no standard of truth. If Trump never says anything
concrete, he never has to do anything concrete. If Trump never makes a
statement of commitment, Trump supporters never have to confront what they
really voted for. If his promises are vague to the point of opacity, Trump
cannot be criticised for breaking them. If every sloppy lie (ie: “Just found
out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower … This is McCarthyism!”)
can be explained away as a “generality” or “just a joke” because of “quotes”,
then he can literally say anything with impunity. Trump can rend immigrant
families in the name of “heart”, destroy healthcare in the name of “life”,
purge minority voters in the name of “justice”, and roll back women’s autonomy
in the name of “freedom”. The constitution? Probably sarcastic. There are “quotes”
all over that thing!
If criticism is
“political correctness” and “political correctness” is censorship, then aren’t
all ideas equally valid? Is the most qualified presidential candidate really
more qualified than a person who is not qualified at all? If we let a scientist
testify before congress about climate change, shouldn’t we also let the retired
basketball player Shaq come and tell them about how he
thinks the Earth is flat because he drove all the way across America
and at no point was he upside down?
We must keep calling
these ideas what they are, and to do that we need a shared understanding of
what words mean. That’s why Trump’s 100 days of gibberish aren’t just
disorienting and silly – they’re dangerous. Trump approaches language with the
same roughshod imperialist entitlement he’s applying to the presidency (and, by
extension, the world) – as though it’s a resource that one man can own and burn
at will, not a vastly complex collective endeavour of which he is only a
steward.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/25/trump-100-days-gibberish-weaponised-white-house-language-presidency