President Trump’s decision to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War might strike skeptics as a silly distraction, and supporters as a brilliant rebranding. Historians may see it in terms of reclaiming a symbol from the nation’s past. I’m a linguist. From that vantage, the executive order didn’t come out of the blue and it wasn’t just an attempt at political distraction. It was consistent in every way with how Trump uses — or abuses — language.
The Department of War was created by the first Congress to oversee the new nation’s military. The Truman administration changed the name to the Department of Defense in 1949, in the wake of splitting the Air Force off from the Army, and brought the two of them together with the Navy under the same umbrella. Trump asserts that since then, the American military has “never fought to win.” According to our commander in chief, “We could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct, or wokey, and we just fight forever.” Getting back to the old name, the theory goes, will help get us back to the old mission.
I’ll leave it to observers, or anyone merely sentient, to decide whether America’s fighting was “wokey” in Korea and Vietnam. Trump is right, however, that there’s a difference between “war” and “defense.” “War” is active; “defense” is reactive. “War” implies initiating battle; “defense” implies engaging in whatever battle is forced upon you. Given how he consistently deploys language as a tool with which to own his opponents, it’s no surprise that he favors “war.”
Even Trump’s most positive-sounding coinages are acts of a certain kind of verbal aggression. I sometimes stop to marvel that the House passed something with the actual official title the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. That goofy bark of a name is a boisterous clap back against opposing views, an attempt to drown out inconvenient facts with braggadocio. It is a linguistic snap of the locker room towel. Every Democrat in Congress, a few Republicans and hordes of people across the land thought the bill was a tragedy. For Trump to nevertheless call it big and beautiful, as if it were one of his buildings or a hairdo, was a jeering “Ha ha!” from Nelson Muntz of “The Simpsons.” This includes the informality of the phrasing. “Big Beautiful Bill”? Imagine the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, titled Eat It, Secessionists!
More of the same is Trump’s almost compulsive use of the superlative. Inflation is hurting people “like never before.” “Nobody has ever seen anything like” our immigration crisis. Trump’s are “the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” “Migrant crime” is “happening at levels nobody thought possible.” For Trump, to say something is to force it, to assert in the same breath that it’s true and that its truth cannot be questioned. And it goes perfectly with the multiple exclamation points with which he accessorizes his social media posts.
Or consider Trump’s new fondness for ending tweets with “Thank you for your attention to this matter.” A typical example came on July 17, when he posted about the birthday note he allegedly wrote for Jeffrey Epstein:
“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein. These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT.”
This usage may seem perplexing or out of character. Does Trump really think people need to be asked to pay attention to him? But he’s not a supplicant earnestly requesting a quick moment of the world’s time. His request is steeped in acrid sarcasm. It implies indignant impatience with the very idea that anyone would not pay attention, or beyond that, would fail to agree. It’s an aggressive, intemperate eye roll. We’re back in the locker room.
That impulse also explains his strange patterns of capitalization. “I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States. Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics,” he wrote on May 16.
People haven’t capitalized nouns in English that way since the 1800s. Back then, capitalization was sometimes used to highlight major concepts or for the sake of rhetorical gravity. “When in the Course of human events,” the Declaration of Independence begins, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
That’s not why Trump does it. He does it to punch. If something fails to please him it’s not a scam but a Scam, not a fake story but a Fake Story. Profanity is another way to punch. Hence how he decorates his threat to sue Rupert Murdoch in the tweet about Epstein. This is the language of someone whose verbal message to the world is one long pitiless sneer.
Heaven knows what’s next. Changing the Department of Justice to the Department of Revenge? But we can be sure that whatever the new directions are in Trumpese, they will be sharp linguistic stings. As the old parable about the scorpion goes, it’s his character.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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