Walking stories

The dirty words of Donald Trump

March 20, 2025

Word soup was my daily special in olden times, when I cooked up a five-times-a-week slop of vowels, consonants and punctuation. That’s all done now, but my head’s still a-brim with words. If I can’t fall asleep I challenge myself to think of words with odd combinations of letters, running through a mental alphabet to make sure I don’t miss any. While walking Greenberg, solutions to that day’s NYT Spelling Bee surprise me by popping up en route. Thus, I feel entirely justified to consider these word-focused thoughts a Walking Story.

I forgive the Trump administration for nothing, but the particular axe I’m grinding here has to do with words.

First a plea for preserving the well-earned dignity of unadorned proper nouns. When the President feels it necessary to sign executive orders with the fattest Sharpie in the Oval Office supply cabinet – too bad they don’t keep a stock of glitter pens for heightened razzle-dazzle – the spiky squiggle is a gaudy overstatement, wielded as a weapon. If there were i’s in “Donald John Trump”; he would likely employ a dagger or a menacing fist to dot them.

Despite the President’s proclamation that English is the official language of this land, papers including the Des Moines Register have reported that he speaks with all the wit and polish of a fourth-grader, displaying the virtuoso vocabulary skills of an eight-year-old. If he were to take it into his head to declare the Bunny Hop the official national dance – an ideal choice, because unlike most other dances, it has no ethnic roots and it is unlikely that it is done socially by illegal immigrants – most people would assume he knew his way around a ballroom floor. In the same way, if he is so intent on the United States being an English-only zone, it seems he should speak with more finesse. You’d also think that he wouldn’t want to preside over limits on that official language’s use.

I’m sure you’ve already heard about the Enola Gay photo removed from the Pentagon’s web site because the name of the plane (which dropped an A-bomb on Hiroshima) included the word “gay.” The New York Times recently published an extensive list of words newly flagged by federal agencies “to limit or avoid.” The federal government frowns upon such hot-button words as “inclusion,” “equality” and “inequality,” “institutional,” “biases,” “privilege,” “pronoun,” “race,” “sex,” “victim” and “diversity,” and such daring terms as “climate science.” If you are approaching the feds with a proposal, or you are administrator of a project that receives federal funding, wash your mouth out with soap if anything you’ve written mentions “injustice” or “minority.” There’s no outright ban on the words, but “federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage,” said the TImes, noting that some of them would “automatically flag” material “that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.” Looking on the bright side, “See Spot run” is always a safe option.

A couple of weeks ago, Marco Rubio (I guess Trump’s “Little Marco” takes seriously the children’s ditty about sticks and stones being harmful “but words will never hurt me”) was talking about why it is practical for the United States to stop giving foreign aid to help eradicate disease and feed the hungry. USAID programs, he said, “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve … the core national interests of the United States.

It’s “interests” that interests me. In the current administration, those “core national interests” include global dominance, the uniforms of the new Space Force, making Elon Musk richer and replacing Air Force One with Air Force One.2, which no doubt has better upholstery than anyone’s ever seen before.

If Rubio had focused on core national “values” rather than “interests,” he might have come up with a better solution than turning his back on the miseries of fellow world citizens. Oh, I forgot, we brought paper towels to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.

Finally, and most of all, down with “deal.” Although “Art of the Deal” was the title of the celebrated author Trump’s first book, he has turned “deal” into a loaded, overused and now-trite concept. In international affairs, “deal,” has replaced “agreement,” “entente,” “pact,” “treaty,” all words that used to indicate a kind of collaboration for the general good.

“Deal,” instead, sounds like the price you’ve agreed to pay after arguing for hours over the price of a used Chevy; or what you crowed to your spouse after finding six-packs of tube socks on sale at the dollar store. “Deal” is what the landlord shakes hands on when he’s sold his rodent-infested apartment house to a developer who’s planning to knock it down.

It has a connotation of financial gain; it has a connotation of someone winning and also someone losing. Ukraine doesn’t need a deal; its people need sovereignty. Gaza doesn’t need a deal; its people need peace and security.

And I don’t need a deal, either. I just need him to stop spewing words as though he knows what they mean. I am trying to hang on to a thread of optimism. Even a Sharpie runs out of ink eventually. It sure smells awful, though, before it becomes useless.