For Trump, Words Are Stupid Things
In Britain late last
week, Conservative Member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, grandson of Winston
Churchill, described Donald Trump as a “daft twerp.”
Soames rightly was
objecting to a Trump tweet that tried to link a 13 percent rise in the crime
rate in England and Wales to radical Islamic terrorism, a notion that the
president may have picked up from a
conspiracy website.
The UK Office for
National Statistics that issued the actual crime numbers denied there was any
connection, leading many other British politicians to denounce the
presidential tweet, including former Tory Prime Minister David
Cameron, who described Trump’s words as “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply
wrong.”
Words. “I have the
best words,” Trump famously
proclaimed during the campaign, and just the other day he told Maria
Bartiromo of Fox News how “well-crafted” his goofy tweets are.
The same man announced
from the White House lawn on Wednesday that “I’m a very intelligent person” —
words that sounded more self-deceptive than presidential.
Trump does have a way
with words. Unfortunately, it’s a gruesome way. His way is to use them as a
blunt instrument to bully and belittle opponents.
The rest of the time —
when he’s not reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter — his way with
English is fumbling, incoherent, reckless and untruthful.
Look no further than
the contretemps that began with his false claim that unlike him, “most other
presidents” didn’t make phone calls to the families of military killed in
action, which then rapidly nosedived even further, using the dead as a
political football, then insulting the widow of a dead Green Beret hero and a
Florida congresswoman.
“Ham-handed,” historian,
retired officer and Gold Star father Andrew Bacevich
said of Trump’s phone call to the wife of slain Sgt. La David
Johnson. “The president’s inability to use the English language is really
without precedent in American politics.”
The president’s
negligible grasp of his native tongue may be part of the reason we’ve been so
taken the last couple of weeks by eloquent speeches from former Presidents
Barack Obama and George W. Bush as well as Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff
Flake, all of whom articulated — without mentioning Trump’s name — deep concern
about the current state of the nation and the planet.
To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of Earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.
We know that when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed; it the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy… Our governing class has often been paralyzed in the face of obvious and pressing needs. The American dream of upward mobility seems out of reach for some who feel left behind in a changing economy. Discontent deepened and sharpened partisan conflicts. Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.
Words matter — an
obvious notion but one that particularly strikes home not only because of those
speeches and the constant reminders of Trump’s benighted language skills but
also from having just finished Thomas Ricks’ book Churchill &
Orwell, a thought-provoking reflection on the lives and work of
Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill and George Orwell, author of
the fable Animal Farm and
the dystopian 1984 —
source of “Big Brother is watching you,” thought police, Newspeak (“War is peace,”
“Freedom is slavery”) and the vision of a world in which truth is subverted to
the state, inconvenient facts relegated to the “memory hole.”
The connection between
the pair may not be obvious — the men came from opposite ends of the political
spectrum; one was flamboyant and public, the other more circumspect and private
— but they were two of the 20th century’s great rhetoricians.
Each had “the same
qualities and tools,” Ricks explains. “Their intellects, their confidence in
their own judgments even when those judgments were rebuked by most of their
contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words.”
The heart of both
men’s stories is in the same crucial period from the rise of the Nazis until
the aftermath of World War II.
In this period, when
so many gave up on democracy as a failure, neither man ever lost sight of the
value of the individual in the world, and all that that means: the right to
dissent from the majority, the right even to be persistently wrong, the right
to distrust the power of the majority, and the need to assert that high
officials might be in error – most especially when those in power strongly
believe they are not.
During the war,
Churchill’s words rallied Britain and the United States in the fight against
fascism.
At the end of his
life, George Orwell produced two masterpieces warning that despite victory over
Germany and Japan, totalitarianism remained a clear and present danger, as it
still does today, closer to home than in decades. “
Many people around
them expected evil to triumph and sought to make their peace with it,” Thomas
Ricks writes. “These two did not. They responded with courage and
clear-sightedness.”
Orwell especially
never stopped trying to see clearly through all the lies, obfuscations, and
distractions. Instead of shaping facts to fit his opinions, he was willing to
let facts change his opinions.”
Orwell believed “Good
prose is like a windowpane,” but in his essay, Politics and the
English Language, warned, “[P]olitical
language… is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
And so we have Donald
Trump, who even in his muddled syntax and circumlocution still manages to
convey a message that fosters anger and fear while eschewing the facts.
Orwell lays it out
in 1984: “The Party told you
to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most
essential command.” All is fake news.
When Trump became
president, he moved back to the Oval Office a bust of
Winston Churchill. Doubtless, he regards the sculpture as a symbol
of intrepid conservatism and resolve, or at least someone told him that.
In any case, it’s
funny to think that Trump has in his eyesight a world leader
who once insisted, “The man
who cannot say what he has to say in good English cannot have very much to say
that is worth listening to.”
In some respects, a
bust of George Orwell might be more appropriate, a reminder that this president
already has brought to life some of the author’s darkest fantasies.
In Trump’s Newspeak
world, a climate denier is put in charge of the EPA, a foe of proper public
schooling heads the Department of Education and unfortunate truths are wiped
from official websites and tossed into the memory hole.
“Trump is a reductive force,” journalist Peter
Ross wrote in a recent superb article about Orwell and 1984 for Boston
Review. “He wants everything to be as
small and mean as his own heart, and he has made a start with words.”
Daft twerp.
Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers
Guild of America-East, was senior writer for Moyers & Company and Bill
Moyers’ Journal and is senior writer of BillMoyers.com.