will be forced to deal with pain.― James Baldwin
George Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language: “newspeak,” a language twisted in order to deceive, seduce, and undermine, becomes fundamental to the operations of a Ministry of Truth whose aim is to root out and abolish language that functions in the service of reason and critical thought. Reason and compassion give way to a rhetoric of rancid bigotry, which works to inform policy and inflict humiliation, misery, and suffering on diverse groups who are viewed as degenerate and repugnant.
Trump’s racism surfaced with great fanfare in his assertion, when launching his presidential campaign, that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people ...”61 Trump’s shameless appeal to white racism was also evident when he repeatedly claimed that the inner cities are composed mostly of African-Americans and that black culture is synonymous with the culture of crime.62 In 2017, Trump allegedly said that people who came to the US from Haiti “all have AIDS.” Another example of such a language was on full display when Donald Trump made headlines at the beginning of 2018 saying that the United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador, and various African nations.63
Trump’s attack on immigrants has drawn sharp rebukes from a number of critics who state that his language is racist, dehumanizes people, and reproduces a form of symbolic violence. In spite of these criticisms, Trump is unapologetic about such comments, wearing them as a badge of honor. For instance, he recalled his 2015 comments about Mexicans being “rapists” in a speech he gave to the National Federation of Independent Business in June 2018 and doubled down on the comments with a statement reeking with derision: “Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized? ‘Oh, it’s so terrible what he said.’ Turned out I was 100 percent right. That’s why I got elected.”64
In addition, Trump’s racist ideology and bow to white supremacist beliefs have been on full display in many of his policies, including legislation designed to ban Muslims entering the country and his assertion that many of them hate the US. His racist messaging was also visible with his call for a US judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit to recuse himself because of his Mexican heritage. In some of his more notorious racist comments, he has referred to immigrants as “animals”65 and has attacked “well-known African-Americans as having ‘low IQs’ or being of low intelligence.”66 Some of the most prominent African-Americans whose intelligence was mocked by Trump include NBA great LeBron James, CNN Anchor Don Lemon, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). This is a view long supported by white nationalists and may explain why, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump refused to denounce the endorsement of David Duke, an American white supremacist, Holocaust denier, and former head Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan.
Trump has a long history of demeaning African-Americans and in one notorious incident stated with no evidence that President Obama was a terrible student and that he should never have been accepted by both Columbia University and Harvard Law School.67 Given his support for white nationalism and his coded call to “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s overtly racist remarks echo the white supremacy of fascist dictators in the 1930s. Behind Trump’s politics of incivility, his use of vulgarity, and his disparagement of the poor and non-whites lies the terrifying discourse of ethnic cleansing and the politics of disposability.68
In this case, more underlies the language of white nationalism and racial resentment. There is also a discourse that annihilates social codes and restrained political behavior and undermines the rule of law. This is a police state vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only as faceless and voiceless, but as excess, redundant, and subject to expulsion. It also informs policies marked by malignant cruelty, legitimates forms of state violence, and mirrors a shift in popular opinion. The United States has a long history of racist language leading to cruel and harmful practices and, in some cases, violence aimed at groups targeted by such language. It was not too long ago that politicians, pundits, and sociologists “labeled black and Latino youth as ‘super-predators’ to justify prison expansion, vastly increased sentencing, and overly aggressive law enforcement that has devastated communities of color.”69 The Trump administration with its legitimation of racist and demeaning rhetoric has emboldened the rise of white supremacists, the alt-right, and neo-Nazis along with a growing popular support and tolerance for such groups — matched by an uptick in violence against blacks, Muslims, Jews, Latinos, transgendered people, and others who are the object of state-approved bigotry and hatred.
While there is no denying that Trump’s legitimation of white nationalists and neo-Nazis constitutes a growing threat to democracy, the real danger lies deeper in the growing power of state sanctioned violence of the police, the criminal justice system, schools modeled after prisons, gun violence, and a carceral system that imprisons mostly poor people of color. This is the fast/hard violence that is expanding under the Trump administration, one that has a long legacy in the United States and is not unique to the emergence of the Trump presidency.
As authoritarianism gains in strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible. Words that speak to the truth, reveal injustices, and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to hold dominant power accountable. The Ministry of Truth functions in Orwell’s 1984 as the Ministry of Lies. History is being rewritten both to eliminate dangerous memories and to align the past with narratives that reinforce anti-democratic ideologies and social relations. Terror becomes the essence of politics bolstered by the denigration and erasure of any viable notion of morality and personal and social responsibility. Notions of virtue honor, respect, and compassion are policed, and those who advocate for them are punished.
Guided by Arendt’s insight into the dynamics of totalitarianism, education both within and outside of institutionalized schooling becomes a tool not only to instill authoritarian convictions but to destroy the ability of the populace to form any convictions that are on the side of justice, freedom, and thoughtfulness. I think it is fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction. Under the regime of Donald Trump, the Ministry of Truth has become the Ministry of Fake News, and the language of “Newspeak” has multiple platforms, morphing into a giant disimagination machinery of propaganda, ignorance, hypocrisy, and fear. Trump’s language and politics have a high threshold for disappearance and zones of terminal exclusion and, as a form of pedagogical regulation, works hard to eliminate expressions of discontent, resistance, and popular democratic struggles.
With the advent of Trump’s presidency, language is undergoing a shift in the United States: it now treats dissent, critical media, and scientific evidence as a species of “fake news.”70 The administration also views the critical media as the “enemy of the American people.” In fact, the Trump administration has repeated this view of the media so often that “almost a third of Americans believe it” and “favor government restrictions on the press.”71 Language has become unmoored from critical reason and informed debate – the weight of scientific evidence and is now being reconfigured within new relations of power tied to pageantry, political theater, and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism. Language is shaped increasingly by the widespread banality of celebrity culture, the celebration of ignorance over intelligence, a culture of rancid consumerism, and a corporate controlled media that revels in commodification, spectacles of violence, the spirit of unchecked individual interest, and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos.
Under such circumstances, language is emptied of substantive meaning and functions increasingly to lull large swaths of the American public into acquiescence, if not a willingness to accommodate and support a rancid populism and galloping authoritarianism. One consequence is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear, injustices
