The word smiths in the White House

It used to be, in the good old days, which were neither old at the time nor entirely good, that political phraseology had some staying power. The 1960s gave us some expressions great only in that they contained the word, such as the Great Society and the Great Silent Majority; some decidedly ungreat ones such as Vietnamization and Burn, baby, burn; and some completely ridiculous ones courtesy of Spiro Agnew, including radiclibs and nattering nabobs of negativism; and most of them, even some of Agnew’s, stuck around long enough to gain some popular traction. You could use them in casual conversation and people would know what you were talking about.

          The George W. Bush era brought us a fresh batch of concepts du jour, including compassionate conservative, boots on the ground, and the American Dialectic Society’s 2002 so-called Word (singular) of the Year, weapons of mass destruction. Boots on the ground fell out of common parlance not long after the expiration of the six-month time limit the Bush administration initially set on their remaining on the ground in Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction fell out of favor too, discredited as the most egregious of the false pretenses under which we invaded Iraq. You don’t hear compassionate conservative used much anymore either. Compassion seems to have fallen out of favor among conservatives, or at least among a sizable percentage of people who purport to be conservative. Cruelty, or at best indifference to suffering, seems more the order of the day in the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

But if you can fault Trump and his supporters for lactating too little the milk of human kindness, you cannot accuse them of fostering too little catch-phrase formation. Trump and his manic freak show of a presidency are generating new phrases or highlighting previously seldom-seen older ones at a stunning clip. Before he ever ran for president, he inspired The Donald. His campaign introduced us to Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary, the wall, fake news, extreme vetting and tweet storm; grabbed our attention with Grab ’em by the pussy and focused it on the white working class (a group including, or more or less corresponding to, people previously more often designated as rural whites, evangelicals, the Great Silent Majority, hardhats or Reagan Democrats); and marshaled a bunch of robust imperatives, some new, some retreads from bygone contests, including Make America Great Again, Build the Wall, Lock ’er up! and Drain the Swamp, this last an old expression but with a new hashtag short form of DTS. His election instantly brought forth Not my president; and somewhere along the line we’ve gotten alt-right and, more predictably, Trumpian, Trumpist and the Party of Trump.

This has all been verbally fecund enough. But since Trump took office, the terms and outlandish remarks have been popping up and going viral so fast, to quote Trump himself, “your head will spin.” Or perhaps yours has already begun to. In just its first three months his presidency has given us alternative facts, the lying media, its German counterpart, Lügenpresse, and its analog, the press as the opposition party; the deconstruction of the administrative state; the de-operationalizing of the National Security Council; Tweeter in Chief, incidental intelligence, unmasking and deep state; highlighted NAFTA, the emolument clause, filibuster, judicial review, the Congressional Review Act and sanctuary and resurrected the nuclear option, all amid a swirl of collusion, recusal, preposterous allegations, Russian links, early-morning tweet storms, war crimes, terror attacks, congressional probes, sex scandals, a missile strike, gratuitous antagonizing of allies, comically adversarial press conferences, West Wing power struggles and Kellyanne Conway hawking Ivanka Trump’s clothing line on Fox & friends.

How long the verbiage tossed up amid all this mayhem sticks around will no doubt vary from phrase to phrase, but the sheer volume of political terms being coined, recoined, highlighted or inspired by Donald Trump probably dooms many of them to brief currency. Some of them seem to have faded already. The so-called deep state may pop back up from the depths, but it seems already, after a week or so of notoriety, to have sunk back into the conspiratorial ooze from which it emerged a month or so ago.

Those of us still around ten or twenty years from now may still remember some or all of the many novel terms and concepts and stunning quotes the Trump presidency will have generated by the time it runs its course, but how many of them will seem as quaint then, and suffer as much neglect, as radiclib or, say, from a slightly later era, the Moral Majority, does now?

In any case, Donald Trump’s astounding flaws and limited vocabulary notwithstanding, in sheer volume he and his entourage figure to enrich, or at least enlarge, our political lexicon more than any previous administration. Their political circus features an etymological sideshow as creative as the action under the Big Top is destructive. They’re both fascinating. If we’re lucky, we’ll emerge, feeling grimy and vulgar but alive, from the collapsing Big Top one day and look back on it, lying limp and deflated amid a bed of verbal debris, and wonder, “Did any of that make sense?”