It seemed that the Age of Orwell was upon us in the early 2000s, when then-President Bush made a monkey out of words in a way that called to mind the maneuvers of politicians in 1984. There were the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” used to justify the Iraq War; there were the government programs that did the exact opposite of what their names promised: “No Child Left Behind,” the “Clear Skies Act.”
We had no idea then where we were headed. From the vantage point of 2017, Bush seems hapless, befuddled, in over his head. He does not seem, like Trump and his cronies, to have been engaged in the systematic dismantling of the truth, achieved through a calculated uncoupling of words from their meanings and corresponding realities.
I’m not talking about Trump’s first-grade vocabulary (Great! Amazing! Sad! Bad!) or his butchering of our beautiful language (Unpresidented! Covfefe!), all of which is upsetting in its own right, especially for people like me (English teachers). What keeps me up at night is the way he uses language to shape a reality of his own design. Just like the maniacs who control Oceania in Orwell’s novel, Trump wields empty, paradoxical, and unabashedly false sentences like weapons. He demonizes and lionizes others for political purposes. He acts like because he has said a thing, it is true. (And because someone else has said it and he didn’t like it, it’s not true.) Language becomes a way to remake the world in his own image.
At first there were the campaign promises to Make America Great Again—a misleading construction suggesting both that America had once been great and that it was no longer—and the campaign smears about Crooked Hillary (Lock Her Up!), based on no actual information and deflecting attention from all the real-life shady businesses, lawsuits, and tax evasions on Trump’s own record. Then, when he took office, he rolled out a seemingly endless string of phony claims (inauguration numbers, illegal voters), evasions (ties to Russia), confused statements (Frederick Douglass), and self-inflating nonsense (high ratings, A-pluses), much of which was repeated and reinforced by the Trump machine, including Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kellyanne Conway, the modern face of misinformation, who coined the ultimate piece of Trumpish Newspeak: “alternative facts.”
But perhaps his greatest linguistic coup was “fake news,” a term that was originally used to describe the pro-Trump propaganda being broadcast by shady alt-right websites, such as Breitbart News, but which Trump then coopted and spit back at reputable newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post any time they said something that ruffled his fragile ego. He must have a hard time keeping up with all the negative news stories about him, since they continue to proliferate, and he loves to follow up each one with a tweet proclaiming it Fake News! (Speaking of which, the Trump-dubbed “Failing New York Times” is not, by any measure, failing.)
In Trump Land, every day is opposite day. Neo-nazis are “fine people” and peaceful protesters are “sons-of-bitches.” If Trump says something is “going great” or someone is “doing an amazing job,” it’s almost a guarantee that the thing is an unmitigated disaster, and the person is making a terrible mess. This week, we got this gem in response to the mass shooting in Las Vegas: “We’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.” What does that mean? That is worse than the sentences I mark as “vague” and “unclear” on my students’ papers. And it is much, much worse in terms of the human cost.
Hollow language has seeped into every facet of this administration. We have a Secretary of Education who doesn’t believe in public education, a Secretary of Energy who proposed abolishing the Energy department, and a head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who doesn’t seem to think that the environment needs protecting. It was revealed this week that Michael Dourson is Trump’s pick to head the Office of Chemical Safety for the EPA—a man who is notorious for greenlighting all sorts of harmful chemicals in his job as a risk assessor. It is Orwell’s Ministry of Peace (responsible for warmongering), Ministry of Truth (lies and propaganda), and Ministry of Love (torture and murder) made manifest.
As Orwell knew, language is ultimately about power. Trump has the biggest platform in the world right now, and he is using it to solidify his own power—to make himself look as BIG LEAGUE (or is it BIGLY?) as possible and to make his political enemies look SAD! Scarier than that, the ultimate effect of draining words of their meaning is that you rob people of the language with which to criticize you because the language itself has become empty. We call fake news fake; he calls real news fake. How can anyone tell the difference?
In 1984, a colleague of Winston’s named Syme is thrilled with the possibilities for a language sapped of both meaningful content and beauty. Over lunch in the cafeteria at the Ministry of Truth, he says, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Or, as Joan Didion put it in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”
Of all the many fronts we’re fighting on—marching in the streets, agitating at the local level, calling our representatives, donating to human rights organizations, and many more—one of them must be the fight to preserve the meaning of words. We have to keep committing thought-crime. We have to keep speaking truth to power, while we can still tell the difference between truth and lies.