Abstract
So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give . . . The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.—Donald Trump, “Save America” Rally, January 6, 2021
I am writing this about a month and half after an angry mob attempted a coup on January 6 that wrecked parts the Capitol building, and about a week after the acquittal of former U. S. president Donald J. Trump. During that trial, the second of two, the Democratic House impeachment managers spent days attempting to prove that Trump incited the deadly insurrection by using words filled with hate, vitriol, and marching orders to attack America’s democracy and the lawmakers protecting it, including Vice President Mike Pence. Presented above are the last words said before the insurrectionists did, in fact, walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to shatter windows, steal items and information, walk around the Capitol with Confederate flags, kill a police officer, and build gallows to hang anyone unfortunate to get in their way.
Again, all because of words.
In When Words Trump Politics: Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language, a monograph about the power of our former president’s words, Adam Hodges writes, “There is a definite distinction between a president who fights back against bona fide political arguments, and a person who uses the presidential bully pulpit to engage in aggressive personal attacks that seek to harm or intimidate” (p. 11). The beauty of Hodges’s text, which is written “to offer insights into how Americans, particularly journalists and politicians, can successfully respond to the spell of demagoguery” (p. x) and to promote “a keen awareness of the way language is used to convey, discuss, debate, and contest those issues” (p. xi), is that it speaks directly to what the United States went through in January when Trump riled up his supporters and urged them to storm the Capitol while House members and senators were certifying a legitimate election. Very much like the doomed-from-the-start House impeachment managers, Hodges, a sociocultural linguist and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Colorado, presents damning evidence to prove that the words of our impeached but not convicted former president could (and unfortunately did) “lead to the marginalization of politics as a means for working through disagreements and settling competing power claims, leaving violence or even civil warfare as the only remaining recourse” (p. 151). Hodges’s words, which are logical and credible, are also disturbingly prophetic, in that he knows as well as most lucid people that past is prologue and what we say and how we say it matters. The riot was proof of that.
How Hodges proves his argument is he takes Trump’s words and he analyzes them using easily digestible short essays so the audience can carefully follow his rationale that Trump was the “bully-in-chief.” Hodges keeps it simple in the hopes he can use it for either reinforcement or as a mode of persuasion for those that may follow a “Trumpian discourse [that] has helped shift politics toward a winner-take-all warfare model with enemies to dominate or vanquish” (p. 151). He starts with Trump’s use of cyberbullying and then proceeds to post-truth politics, political theater and spectacle, responsibility and deniability, the propagation of conspiracy theories, fake news and misinformation, terrorism, racism, political resistance, and Supreme Court politics—all in the name of what Trump calls our democratic freedoms to speak the way we want, but what others would call a populist, White nationalist agenda specifically geared toward making sure that his power is preserved. The will of the people does not matter, according to Hodges; this is about a man who is not just “shaping our times,” but “is very much a product of our times” (p. 117).
Hodges presents a persuasive argument that language “provides various ways for us to take ownership of words and actions or, conversely, to shirk responsibility for things previously said and done” (p. 46) and that politicians are notorious at “playing language games” (p. 46). He also strongly states that Trump, although an anti-intellectual propaganda-monger who expertly disseminates lies and xenophobic rhetoric, is savvy about how he uses words, whether in person or on social media, to ensure he is not only safe from any ramifications but also impervious to legal prosecution. The only issue with Hodges’s work is he does not see that Trump’s power has overshadowed Old-School Conservatism. He says that the only way to move past Trump is to recognize “his lack of reliability and genuine interest in being a good faith partner in politics; then [look] for ways to ensure he becomes politically irrelevant without feeding his ego or the outrage his ego spawns” (p. 143). Prior to writing this review, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House Minority Leader, went to Mar-a-Lago, and, as of the day of this writing, Representative Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s second, went there to speak about the GOP divide currently happening, a divide that shows us that Trump is not leaving the political stage.
In other words, although Hodges hopes that ethics and reason will prevail, the hostile regime of language and, more dangerously of Trump, is seemingly still going to be here and will not be departing any time soon.