100 days of gibberish - Trump has weaponised nonsense [View all]

[babylonsister]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/25/trump-100-days-gibberish-weaponised-white-house-language-presidency?CMP=fb_us

100 days of gibberish – Trump has weaponised nonsense
Lindy West

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

Tuesday 25 April 2017 08.09 EDT
Last modified on Tuesday 25 April 2017 17.00 EDT


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.)

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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.