Are we winning?
“We’ve won,” President Trump announced at a rally on March 11, as the widening war in Iran started to rock oil markets and supply chains, and Iran escalated attacks on tankers and refineries across the Middle East.
“Let me tell you,” Mr. Trump insisted, “we’ve won.”
What did he mean? Mr. Trump’s use of the past participle of “win” expresses a completed action. “Win” can’t mean victory when ongoing fighting continues to throw the world economy into chaos. This instance is one of many in which Mr. Trump uses crisp, straightforward verbs to obfuscate.
As a critic and writing teacher, I’m fascinated by the tremendous power of verbs — language’s little fireballs — to shape how we understand the world. Verbs rule communication. Many linguists go so far as to see sentences as extensions of verbs with other accouterments.
I have observed a set of patterns in the way Mr. Trump speaks and writes over his two terms in office that reveal how the president uses verbs to evade responsibility and even proclaim a new form of leadership. Perhaps surprisingly, this is true even when Mr. Trump is proudly, if also prematurely, declaiming military successes.
“Win” and a set of other forceful action verbs and verb phrases — tell, hit, crush, destroy, knock out, kill, obliterate — account for much of the rock-ribbed, informal quality Mr. Trump invokes in his speech, which he did even before the country was at war with Iran. He whips up enormous rhetorical energy not from a large or sophisticated vocabulary but from the repeated use of dynamic verbs. The drama and emotion in his speech boil up largely from his choice of verbs — including the way he praises violent actions.
This reached a bizarre, vulgar crescendo in a late-night Truth Social post he made on March 13. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years,” he wrote of the Iranians, “and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
This could be read as mad ravings, or maybe as just a bad attempt at gallows humor. Certainly it is unusual — and possibly unprecedented — for a president to make light of actions that have left thousands dead and injured, including children and other civilians.
President George W. Bush’s early off-the-cuff statements such as “Bring ‘em on,” about revenge for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did not approach Mr. Trump’s jarring glee. “I want justice,” Mr. Bush said at the time. “And there’s an old poster out West, that I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’” Though he only implied bloodletting, Mr. Bush came to regret those remarks during the course of the Iraq war and vowed to avoid sending “wrong impressions about our country.”
Reveling publicly over killing, and claiming that verb to describe one’s personal activity, undermines norms of democratic leadership. It’s unusual even for the world’s despots.
History’s dictators have often been icily succinct. “To keep you is no benefit,” Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime told citizens during its genocide; “to destroy you is no loss.”
That kind of dispassionate and eerily thought-through way with words is not in Mr. Trump’s wheelhouse. His style is experimental and impulsive. He’s unafraid to take risks; he improvises and zigzags. He voices dramatic ideas in offhand ways, ideas that carry grave geopolitical and human consequences.
“I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on March 16, in the equivalent of a verbal shoulder shrug. “Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it.” He repeats “take”— an aggressive word — while keeping its meaning hidden. Is he considering capturing the island’s president, as he did with Venezuela; attacking the infrastructure, as in Iran, or simply dragging out the economic torture to a brutal end?
Compare this approach with that of President Barack Obama, who tended to guide his audience through an argument with verbs pointing to specific policy measures and other concrete actions: “We’re going to help bring jobs and growth to hard-hit neighborhoods by giving tax breaks to business owners who invest and hire in those neighborhoods.”
Recently, I’ve heard Mr. Trump intensify his habit of repetition, restating simple verbs without further explanation. He still favors the dynamic and blunt, but he uses these words to create maximal stakes and paint a vivid, if misleading, picture as he did Wednesday night in his address on the war in Iran: “Our enemies are losing and America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before.”
During his State of the Union address earlier this year, Mr. Trump accused Democrats of concocting the issue of affordability, “knowing full well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure.” He persisted with “cause,” “know” and “create,” repeating the verbs in a chant.
“You caused that problem. You caused that problem. They knew their statements were a lie. They knew it. They knew their statements were a dirty, rotten lie. Their policies created the high prices.”
Squeezing knotty arguments into simple moral statements and drumming out a dramatic rhythm makes his message of blame stick in the minds of listeners. It also bears the markings of his reality TV background: bullying aggression and hyperbole. Yet the president did not elaborate on how his targets caused the problem; he offered no details to back up his accusations. The verbs were a dead end.
I don’t think Mr. Trump is unsophisticated in the way he wields language — far from it. He can load up the graphic detail through vivid, dynamic verbs when he wants to, such as in one of the stories of bravery he told in his State of the Union address, perhaps with the help of his speechwriters: “He absorbed four agonizing shots, shredding his leg into numerous pieces. … And even as he was gushing blood, which was flowing back down the aisle — helicopter lands at a steep angle, the machine guns stood right in front of him.”
But when it comes to the policies and actions of his administration, Mr. Trump reverts to a limited roster of reliable, often coarse verbs that he wields with bravado and uses to say very little.
There is a morality to verbs, especially in political speech. They can reveal the truth and show us when someone is shouldering responsibility, or they can evade all of that and draw the curtain.
Sarah L. Kaufman is the former dance critic of the Washington Post.
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