Mother Jones illustration; Michael Brochstein/Zuma, Bonnie Cash/Pool/CNP/Zuma
In March, Axios reported that Donald Trump’s Oval Office had begun to resemble an Oscar night gift suite, as world leaders and business officials knew that showing up empty handed risked earning Trump’s displeasure. In response to the news outlet’s catalogue of favors visitors bestowed on the president in such meetings, a White House spokesperson declared, “President Trump is a masterful negotiator and is using his astute business acumen to reshape our economy and reinvigorate American economic dominance. Companies and countries are being forced to come to the table and retreat from their America Last policies and once again are betting on America.”
Trumpese is used by government spokespeople, who provide absurdly aggressive (and often comically untrue) responses.
This was, of course, ridiculous—a hamfisted bit of propaganda that did not address the allegations in the story and was designed to convince no one. It did, however, do what a lot of statements from Trump administration spokespeople are meant to: telegraph defiance, display a swaggering disregard for the basic tenets of reality, and, of course, curry favor with the president. Welcome to the age of the hyper-aggressive, doggedly loyal flack, who is fluent in one language: Trumpese.
One true and neutral thing to be said about Donald Trump is that he’s transformed how his fans and imitators use the English language. Trump’s love of adverbs, bloviation, grandiosity, exaggeration, baldfaced lies, weird metaphors, and hatred of windmills has been the subject of endless commentary across the last decade. Over that time, the way he talks has increasingly seeped down to the people who seek to emulate him—or at least to keep their jobs in his employ. In his second term, with his chaotically malign agenda in hyperdrive, Trumpese is being used to full effect by government spokespeople, who often answer even the most benign of requests for comment with absurdly aggressive (and often comically untrue) responses.
The level of aggression established itself early, especially with Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung, now the White House communications director. When Trump was audibly lisping during an August campaign appearance, Huff Post‘s S.V. Date asked Cheung about it. His response, in full, was: “Must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked out.” In March, the Atlantic declared Cheung to be “the voice of Trump,” citing his penchant for ruthless campaigning and colorful insults: saying California Sen. Adam Schiff has a “watermelon head,” likening CNN anchor Erin Burnett to “a donkey trying to solve a Rubix cube.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the outlet that the Trump White House has adopted what she called Cheung’s “battle rhythm.” She certainly has, as exhibited by her response to the economic turmoil inflicted by Trump’s April global tariff announcements. As Trump waffled over setting and retracting rates and threw the global economy into chaos, she scolded reporters not to trust their eyes and ears: “Many of you in the media clearly missed the Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.” Her toadying reference to Trump’s 1987 book did not clarify what the president was “doing here,” but it did affirm, again, Leavitt’s fealty to the president.
There may not be a better example of frantic, bizarre administration spin than its response to the revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed military attack plans in at least two separate Signal chats. (One inadvertently included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg alongside senior Trump officials, the latter included Hegseth’s wife, brother, and personal attorney). The response from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, issued on Twitter, was a multi-paragraph fusillade of Trumpese.
“The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda,” he wrote, in part. “This time, the New York Times—and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage—are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article. They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda.”
Trumpese has also been employed in response to the most inconsequential requests for comment. When the New York Times wrote in March about how Donald Trump privately mentioned a childhood love of music to Kennedy Center board members, Cheung declined to answer the reporters’ questions directly, instead describing the president as “a virtuoso” whose “musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.”
Trump, a spokesperson claimed, is “a virtuoso” whose “musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors.”
Nor are the fawning, verbose statements limited to praising Trump himself. Take last month, when the Atlantic reported that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum demands his staff freshly bake him cookies, “once instructed political appointees to act as servers for a multicourse meal,” and dispatched a “Park Police helicopter for his personal transportation.”
The response from a department spokesperson was, again, both non-responsive and absurd—a symphony, if you will, of weird insults and puffery. “These pathetic smears are from unnamed cowards who don’t know Doug Burgum and are trying to stop President Trump’s Energy Dominance agenda,” Interior spokesperson Katie Martin told the outlet in a statement. “Everyone knows Secretary Burgum always leads with gratitude and is humbly working with President Trump.”
Similarly, when Wired reported in May that director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reused the same password for years—one that incorporates the name she’d reportedly been given by the fringe religious sect in which she grew up—White House spokesperson Olivia Coleman wrote, “Attempting to smear the DNI as being in a cult is bigoted behavior,” adding, “Your bigoted lies and smears of a cabinet member and your story fomenting hinduphobia is noted.”
(The Science of Identity Foundation, the group in which Gabbard is alleged to have grown up is a nominally Hare Krishna group, but one not connected to mainstream Hinduism or the larger Hare Krishna movement. Gabbard’s family reportedly has deep ties to Science of Identity, although her personal spokesperson also previously called questions about the group “Hinduphobia,” telling the New York Times that Gabbard “has never and doesn’t have affiliation” with the group.)
Even Trump Media and Technology Group, Donald Trump’s media company, has incorporated a similar communication style. When journalist Hunter Walker recently asked why they were airing bizarre conspiratorial content about lizard people, spokesperson Shannon Devine declared, “Having trafficked in absurd conspiracy theories for years, the partisan hacks at Talking Points Memo, at the behest of their leftwing puppet masters, turn around and demand we censor content on our free-speech platform.” (The irony of accusing TPM of being part of sinister conspiracy for reporting on the company’s content promoting a sinister conspiracy didn’t seem to register.)
In the end, Trumpese doesn’t say much: instead, it’s a kind of blustering white noise designed by turns to provoke, batter, smear and, above all, shut down questioners. And whenever this age of American history is over, its strange linguistic conventions will stand as one of many reminders of just how far things went.
