Speaking in Trumpese

One way you can tell the Republican Party is a full-on personality cult is that his flaks all talk like AI machines programmed solely with Trump’s social media feeds:

In March, Axios reported that Donald Trump’s Oval Office had begun to resemble an Oscar night gift suite, as world leaders and business officials knew that showing up empty-handed risked earning Trump’s displeasure. In response to the news outlet’s catalogue of favors visitors bestowed on the president in such meetings, a White House spokesperson declared, “President Trump is a masterful negotiator and is using his astute business acumen to reshape our economy and reinvigorate American economic dominance. Companies and countries are being forced to come to the table and retreat from their America Last policies and once again are betting on America.”

This was, of course, ridiculous—a hamfisted bit of propaganda that did not address the allegations in the story and was designed to convince no one. It did, however, do what a lot of statements from Trump administration spokespeople are meant to: telegraph defiance, display a swaggering disregard for the basic tenets of reality, and, of course, curry favor with the president. Welcome to the age of the hyper-aggressive, doggedly loyal flack, who is fluent in one language: Trumpese. 

One true and neutral thing to be said about Donald Trump is that he’s transformed how his fans and imitators use the English language. Trump’s love of adverbs, bloviation, grandiosity, exaggeration, baldfaced lies, weird metaphors, and hatred of windmills has been the subject of endless commentary across the last decade. Over that time, the way he talks has increasingly seeped down to the people who seek to emulate him—or at least to keep their jobs in his employ. In his second term, with his chaotically malign agenda in hyperdrive, Trumpese is being used to full effect by government spokespeople, who often answer even the most benign of requests for comment with absurdly aggressive (and often comically untrue) responses. 

The level of aggression established itself early, especially with Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung, now the White House communications director. When Trump was audibly lisping during an August campaign appearance, Huff Post‘s S.V. Date asked Cheung about it. His response, in full, was: “Must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked out.” In March, the Atlantic declared Cheung to be “the voice of Trump,” citing his penchant for ruthless campaigning and colorful insults: saying California Sen. Adam Schiff has a “watermelon head,” likening CNN anchor Erin Burnett to “a donkey trying to solve a Rubix cube.”

In fairness, there also seem to be some Ron Zeigler non-denial-denials being used in the algorithm too, although I do miss the terse minimalism of Nixonian evasions:

There may not be a better example of frantic, bizarre administration spin than its response to the revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed military attack plans in at least two separate Signal chats. (One inadvertently included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg alongside senior Trump officials, the latter included Hegseth’s wife, brother, and personal attorney). The response from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, issued on Twitter, was a multi-paragraph fusillade of Trumpese. 

“The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda,” he wrote, in part. “This time, the New York Times—and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage—are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article. They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda.”  

My favorite, though, is when they do stuff like portraying Trump as a connoisseur of fine art:

Trumpese has also been employed in response to the most inconsequential requests for comment. When the New York Times wrote in March about how Donald Trump privately mentioned a childhood love of music to Kennedy Center board members, Cheung declined to answer the reporters’ questions directly, instead describing the president as “a virtuoso” whose “musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.”

“Take tonight’s show, ‘Lee Greenwood performs the songs of Kid Rock.'”