One of the more pernicious and insidious effects of the regime of US President Donald Trump might well be the damage he does to language itself.
Trumpian language is a thing unto itself — some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.
The US is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.
As researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh pointed out last spring, presidential candidates in general use “words and grammar typical of students in grades 6 to 8, though Donald Trump tends to lag behind the others.”
Indeed, among the presidents in the university’s analysis, Trump’s vocabulary use was the lowest and his grammatical usage was only better than one former US president: George W. Bush.
Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.
As New York Times chief executive Mark Thompson last year noted about one of Trump’s speeches in his book Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?: “The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination, build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It’s a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside.”
Thompson also noted: “Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller, who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics.”
“We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical ‘truth telling’ with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin,” Thompson wrote.
Here is the great danger — many people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting US$5 words. A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth.
It is an upside-down world in which easy lies sound more true than hard facts, but this is what comes from a man who is more watcher than reader, a man more driven by the limelight than by literature.
In January, Vanity Fair attempted to answer the question: “Exactly how much TV does Donald Trump watch in a day?”
They did so by producing this utterly frightening roundup: “Early on in the campaign, Trump told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that he gets military advice from TV pundits. He couldn’t get through a 50-minute Washington Post interview without repeatedly looking at the TV and commenting about what was on it. In November, during the transition, the Post noted that, based on his biography: ‘He watches enormous amounts of television all through the night.’ And just this week, a source told Politico that Trump’s aides are being forced to try and curb some of his ‘worst impulses’ — including TV-watching, apparently: ‘He gets bored and likes to watch TV ... so it is important to minimize that.’”
A piece in the New York Times in the first week of Trump’s presidency noted: “Still, Mr Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.”
Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.
At no time is this more devastatingly obvious than when he grants interviews to print reporters, when he is not protected by the comfort of a script and is not animated by the dazzling glare of television lights. In these moments, all he has is language, and his absolute ineptitude and possibly even lack of comprehension is enormously obvious.
In the past month, Trump has given interviews to print reporters at the Times, The Associated Press, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. Read together, the transcripts paint a terrifying portrait of a man who is simultaneously unintelligible in his delivery, self-assured in his ignorance and consciously bathing in his narcissism.
In the Trump world, facts do not matter, truth does not matter, language does not matter. Passionate performance is the only ideal. A lie forcefully told and often repeated is better than truth — it is accepted as an act of faith, which is better than a point of fact.
This is one of the most heinous acts of this man — the mugging of the meaning, the disassembling of rhetoric until certainty is stripped away from truth like flesh from a carcass.
Degradation of the language is one of Trump’s most grievous sins.
On Sept. 3 in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rolled out a parade of new weapons in PLA service that threaten Taiwan — some of that Taiwan is addressing with added and new military investments and some of which it cannot, having to rely on the initiative of allies like the United States. The CCP’s goal of replacing US leadership on the global stage was advanced by the military parade, but also by China hosting in Tianjin an August 31-Sept. 1 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which since 2001 has specialized
In an article published by the Harvard Kennedy School, renowned historian of modern China Rana Mitter used a structured question-and-answer format to deepen the understanding of the relationship between Taiwan and China. Mitter highlights the differences between the repressive and authoritarian People’s Republic of China and the vibrant democracy that exists in Taiwan, saying that Taiwan and China “have had an interconnected relationship that has been both close and contentious at times.” However, his description of the history — before and after 1945 — contains significant flaws. First, he writes that “Taiwan was always broadly regarded by the imperial dynasties of
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will stop at nothing to weaken Taiwan’s sovereignty, going as far as to create complete falsehoods. That the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never ruled Taiwan is an objective fact. To refute this, Beijing has tried to assert “jurisdiction” over Taiwan, pointing to its military exercises around the nation as “proof.” That is an outright lie: If the PRC had jurisdiction over Taiwan, it could simply have issued decrees. Instead, it needs to perform a show of force around the nation to demonstrate its fantasy. Its actions prove the exact opposite of its assertions. A
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
RSS