Is Donald Trump Changing American English?
When was the last time you heard someone quip that something was “Fake news,” likely in a context unrelated to politics? Or use “Sad!” as an interjection, or “Believe me” to highlight a point? There are many such cases of this sort of thing, with phrases that originated with a certain American politician going viral in people’s everyday speech.
The trend is hardly limited to the United States. I was recently in Greenland, where Mr. Trump is not generally well-liked, and saw an Inuit man wearing a “Make Greenland free again” cap. That might be taken the wrong way by the dealmaker-in-chief, but I have seen analogous parodies everywhere from San Francisco to India.
Donald Trump is not the first politician to have a way with words. What does make him unique, though, is how many of his utterances have caught on in daily life. Barack Obama’s “Hope” posters were iconic, but you cannot really use that in conversation. Twenty years ago, people around the world knew funny “Bushisms” like “I think we all agree, the past is over,” but again, they never really entered our daily lexicon. By contrast, a different 2000s catchphrase, “You’re fired,” is still recognisable as that of reality TV star Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump’s genius is a combination of general applicability, and vibes. Joe Biden’s “C’mon, man!” did have the genes of virality, but it just did not seem so amusing coming from him. By contrast, Trumpisms have continued to tick up (see above), regardless of how people feel about the man himself, and even in periods when his political star was dim. People forgot about Bushisms soon after W. left office, but Trumpisms were resurgent even as their progenitor languished in the wilderness.
Of course, this small but notable shift in how we speak is not purely the product of one man’s linguistic talents, whatever his ego may suggest. New technology is a transformative tool, in language as well as in politics. If John F. Kennedy had run newspaper ads that simply repeated his surname over and over again, that would not have been very effective messaging. But on the new medium of television, it was enormously successful.
Barack Obama was lauded for his social media prowess, and deservedly so. But it is worth considering that, in his day, the medium did not operate that differently from older media. Thirty-second ads and flashy posters already existed, so one did not have to reimagine much to post them on Facebook. By the time Mr. Trump came along, however, things had changed.
When Abraham Lincoln squared off against Stephen A. Douglas, each laid out his platform in dueling ninety-minute speeches, with lengthy breaks for preparing cogent and thoughtful responses. By 2016, Donald Trump won by condensing his entire platform into a litany of 160-character tweets. More recently, he has proven equally adept with TikTok, which serves well in an age when many people get their political news in seconds-long reels and clipped-together montages from events or debates.
Thoughtful people can lament this, as they did in the early days of television, or a century earlier, when democratic politics was transformed by universal enfranchisement and mass literacy. To be fair, other politicians who enjoy august repute today used language to capitalise on what peers saw as vulgarisation wrought by new technology. Franklin D. Roosevelt dropped his Ivy League oratory in his fireside chats, and Winston Churchill famously favoured simple, solid, Anglo-Saxon words in his radio addresses. On the other side of the ledger, Adolf Hitler used biting, relatable humor to make some fairly heavy messaging both engaging and palatable to everyday radio-listeners and theatre-goers.
Whichever of these figures you choose to associate the current American president with, it is undeniable that he has followed in all of their footsteps linguistically. But he is not the only one riding the new wave.
Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding libertarian president of Argentina, opened his presidency by shredding half the government. A video of him yanking ministries off a chart, pronouncing that each was afuera! (“out”) went viral. He is a controversial figure, but Latin Americans of all stripes have been inspired to take unwanted things, from streaming subscriptions to annoying friends, afuera!
Boris Johnson’s very effective slogan “Get Brexit done” has since been parodied, with “getting X done” suggesting oversimplification of a complex task. Narendra Modi’s 2014 election slogan “Good days are coming” has likewise become an ironic way to comment on things going wrong. Angela Merkel’s phrase “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do it”), originally used at the outset of what became a refugee crisis, has enjoyed a slightly sunnier meme afterlife, still used sometimes to express optimism, but other times sarcastically.
All these have taken off in the modern age of social media, but the memeification phenomenon is not entirely new. In 1990, Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C. was caught on camera smoking crack with a hooker. Asked for a comment, he asserted that, “Bitch set me up, goddamn bitch.” This quickly began to appear on t-shirts; my parents, who lived in D.C. at the time, still use it today. The slogan proved so effective that, after a period in the political wilderness, it helped propel him to reelection.
As anyone from Argentina to Germany to America can attest, adopting a politician’s language can be done out of derision, admiration, or with no political angle at all. But if public relations luminaries like Messrs. Trump and Barry have proven nothing else, all press is good press.
Naturally, many Americans (and others) will resent what a huge influence Mr. Trump manages to exert in such a basic area of our lives. It is hard to avoid, though. In a meeting I had at work recently, a colleague referred to somewhat shady counterparties on a deal as “a bunch of bad hombres.” He does not support the president, nor his immigration agenda, nor has he ever lived in the United States. In this day and age, does that matter?
Language changes constantly, and the natural process is often augmented by technological and cultural developments. Donald Trump is not the first talented celebrity to use new tools to get his way of talking on the tips of people’s tongues. But in our new digital age, he has proven more adept than any other politician, possibly ever.
