Donald Trump's Language Is Reshaping American Politics
Do the president’s words matter?
In Donald Trump’s first year in office, there has been a surprisingly widespread effort to argue that they do not. Liberals and moderates occasionally insist that the media and the public should shift their attention from the president’s vulgar statements to the real policy work happening at federal agencies. Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have repeatedly ignored and dismissed Trump’s most shocking comments; criticized the media for paying attention to his tweets; feigned forgetfulness of his vulgarities; and even made jokes about all that ignoring, dismissing, and forgetting.
The upshot seems to be: Ignore the words, heed the substance.
But Trump’s words are his substance. “Politics is persuasion as well as coercion,” the political scientist Jacob Levy last week, rightly arguing that Trump has “changed what being a Republican means.” He has the basics of American government—but through persuasive insistence. On issues as diverse as the alleged dangers of immigration and the nature of truth, Trump’s words have the power to cleave public opinion, turning nonpolitical issues into partisan maelstroms and turning partisan attitudes on their head. Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t produce the legislative artifacts that journalists typically use to analyze presidential power—it hasn’t translated to many actual laws passed. But the country is only just beginning to understand the scope of Trump’s lexical influence.
