Trumpworld’s War on Words

Words matter—especially when they’re being rewritten. In this sharp piece from Vanity Fair, Molly Jong-Fast examines how Donald Trump and his allies are weaponizing language itself—redefining terms, reshaping narratives, and even proposing new names for familiar landmarks. It’s not just political theater; it’s a calculated effort to control how we talk, think, and remember.

The administration’s attack on the AP, along with efforts to rewrite history and reframe reality, only reaffirms the maxim that language is power.

The right-wing war on all things “woke” has relied on a critical weapon: language. Trumpworld’s culture-war arsenal may contain many things—a flurry of social media posts and videos, an army of sympathetic media propagandists—but all of these tools rely on language.

It feels ironic to talk about the importance of language in MAGA’s rhetoric when Donald Trump uses so many malapropisms and shorthands to convey his ideas. Think of “the weave,” his tendency to tack back and forth between completely different, ancillary topics when speaking in public.

But while Trump may not be particularly careful about every word—or any word, really—his administration and allies are laser-focused on their intrinsic power. They’ve used phrases like “biological reality” and “maiming” to dispute transgender people’s existence and rail against gender reassignment surgery. They’ve disingenuously used words like “energy emergency” to ramp up offshore drilling. One of Trump’s early executive orders combatted nonexistent “censorship”—in actuality, a catchall term for any effort to combat the misinformation and disinformation propagated by Trump and his allies.

Now the Trump administration has barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the esteemed news agency will not follow the president’s executive order and refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” (According to Axios, this is just one of MAGA’s frustrations with the AP stylebook.) And the National Park Service, seemingly at the direction of Trump’s anti-“gender ideology” executive order, has deleted all mentions of “transgender” and “queer” people from the Stonewall National Monument’s websites—a Stalinesque erasure of the T and Q in LGBTQ, despite their crucial role in early queer-rights movements.

Trump and his allies understand the power of words, and his administration is quickly becoming one that’s obsessed with perverting their meaning. George Orwell reminded us of the political power of language in 1984 by using two different very complementary ideas—“newspeak” a euphemism for the heavily simplified language of propaganda, and “doublethink,” one example of which is “freedom is slavery,” a phrase similar to “arbeit macht frei,” translated to “work makes one free,” infamously used by Nazi Germany. Those concepts ring heavily in Trump’s executive order titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence And Readiness.” The name belies the fact that the order bans trans people from serving in the US military and prohibits the use of identification-based pronouns in the Department of Defense. How does banning trans people prioritize “excellence”? How does abolishing identification-based pronouns figure into “readiness”?

The Trump executive order abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the military is called “Restoring America’s Fighting Force.” What exactly is being restored? Does a pre-1960s army somehow fight better than a post-1960s army? None of these questions actually matter to Trumpworld, because precision of language isn’t the point—it’s just overly simplistic propaganda.

And then there’s Trumpworld’s retaking the word “democracy” for their own purposes. Elon Musk told a Pennsylvania town hall crowd in October that the people “who say Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves a threat to democracy.” Musk spends a lot of time tweeting about democracy, but such posts seem to intentionally twist the meaning of the word to fit his own needs. For example, when a judge temporarily blocked his and Trump’s early actions, Musk tweeted last week that “Democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup. An activist judge is not a real judge.” Two days later, he tweeted, “If ANY judge ANYWHERE can stop EVERY Presidential action EVERYWHERE, we do NOT live in a democracy.” From a simple Twitter search of Musk’s username and the word “democracy,” it becomes evident that when the world’s richest man says something or someone is threatening democracy, he really just means it’s something he doesn’t like.

The Trump administration has also worked hard to replace our traditional political lexicon with contradictory doublethink. As Shawn McCreesh wrote in The New York Times, “An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched.” Words like patriotism (see: “patriotic education”), freedom, and a favorite of the far right, “anti-American,” are frequently deployed in ways that mean their opposite. (The phrase “un-American” was a key buzzword of McCarthyism, a movement that just like Trumpism targeted intellectuals and academics, including my grandfather Howard Fast. The central premise was that communism was so profoundly corrosive that if communists were allowed to write movies or books or magazine articles, they could have Svengali-like influence over the reading public, forcing them to ditch capitalism. This administration seems to view “DEI” as a similar catchall for ideas they don’t like.)

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote about Trumpworld’s dishonest relationship with words and phrases like “transparency” (while firing multiple inspectors general), “free speech” (despite the censorious nature of their edicts), and “deficit” (which Trump’s desired tax cuts would only increase). Kessler also noted how the Trump administration, including Musk’s DOGE, seems to call policies it doesn’t agree with “fraud,” when that is not what the word fraud means.

Even The Atlantic’s conservative columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams admits that Trumpworld is at war with the English language, utilizing the tools of censorship while somehow also claiming the mantle of free speech warriors. “Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them,” Williams wrote. “The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right.” This checks out when you compare the careful, halting, almost fearful language of many Democratic elected officials versus the strident, giddily hostile language of many Republicans.

But anyone who thinks Trump isn’t at war with language, with words and their meanings, should look no further than a world map. There’s reason to think that Trump’s “Gulf of America” name change is about more than just asserting American primacy in the region; it could also speak to his larger ambitions—his quest to rewrite parts of history. After all, Republicans have long been at war with history, trying to mute and soften the teaching of America’s original sin—slavery—and using book bans to prevent certain stories from being told.

It may seem odd that language has taken such a central role in an administration that seems so slapdash. But it makes sense. Trump ran an attack ad that used the line, “Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you.” It was, of course, misleading; prisons, under Trump, offered gender-affirming care, which the campaign was then criticizing Harris for supporting. But it didn’t matter because the language was effective. It was just a few words summing up Trump’s ethos by dumbing it down to: Other people are coming for your stuff.