Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

A trademark Trumpian approach to attacking language is to take words and throw them into a pile that means nothing. In April 2017, he gave several media interviews to discuss his first hundred days in office. The AP published one that was almost all word salad. Number one, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the fifty-nine missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, seventy-nine [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area—you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away—and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet. . . . every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. [unintelligible] . . . This is involving death and life and so many things. . . . So it’s far more responsibility. [unintelligible] . . . The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world. A partial list of words that lost their meaning in this passage is: “responsibility,” the number “fifty-nine” and the number “seventy-nine,” “death,” “people,” “risk,” “city,” “civilian,” “hamlet,” “decision,” “hard,” “normal,” “life,” “the United States.” Even the word “unintelligible,” inserted by the journalist, became suspect here. While it is...