Trump has a new target: The words Americans use

Trump rewrites midterm language on AI, affordability and Iran

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4 hours ago - Politics & Policy

Trump wants to rewrite the midterm lexicon

* Avery Lotz

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*Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios*

President Trump has long nicknamed his opponents, and now, as November approaches, he's even trying to dictate the vocabulary around *key issues*.

**The big picture:** Trump's latest effort to reshape political language follows his longtime political strategy: Define the terms of the debate, and you gain power over the debate itself.

* But as polling on those issues continues to haunt the president's party, Trump's new vocabulary may not be enough to change voters' minds.

**Case in point:** Americans are worried about AI — but to Trump, that word no longer exists. It's "super intelligence" now.

* Voters are also concerned about affordability, but that's a "new word" and a "hoax," Trump says.
* And the war in Iran? Sometimes Trump says it's a war — a word that carries strict legal implications — and other times it's an "excursion," a "military operation" or a "skirmish."

**The intrigue:** The issues are starkly different, but the throughline is the way Trump frames the linguistic building blocks of political debate.

* "If you can actually get everyone who influences our perception of language to adopt your language, you have a very powerful capacity," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

**What they're saying:** "President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress," White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement to Axios.

**The latest:** As fears about AI's potential threat to humanity (which the president has labeled a "hoax") boiled over, Trump — who has favored a light regulatory touch — signed an executive order replacing "artificial" with a different word: "super."

* "This is a highly contentious issue right now that is working against him because his position is unpopular," Jamieson says.
* She adds: "But AI … is so pervasive right now in the news environment and the anxieties of the culture that if you can attach positive affect to it as opposed to negative affect to it, you've accomplished something."
* The reaction has been mixed: Elon Musk said he'd rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, but Sam Altman told Politico he wouldn't rename OpenAI, noting that "brands are sticky."

**Zoom in:** Trump is also fighting an uphill battle against the word "affordability": a simple term for complex economic strain that Democrats harnessed in key elections and have championed throughout the midterm cycle.

* He's said it's a word the press devised, a "fake word" and a Democratic "con job." But unlike with SI, he hasn't offered an alternative.
* But he's also leaned on his own midterm buzz words, "communism" being a prime example.

**Between the lines: "**If you can shape which words are used in a political debate and how those words are defined, then you've won the debate before it even starts," explains Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M professor and author of "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump."

* "President Trump knows this, of course, and has been very successful in re-framing or re-defining issues," she writes to Axios, pointing to his popularization of the term "fake news." But Trump's "frame warfare isn't surprising" as "it is essential to how politics works today."
* Trump's second administration has expanded that battle over language, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario and the Department of Defense. Keywords tied to diversity and gender have driven grant cancellations.
* And with Trump's punitive response to anyone who doesn't use his preferred language, Jamieson says: "You may be adding a function to the presidency, a controversial function, which is namer-in-chief."

**The bottom line:** Our perceptions can be shaped by language — but the key question for November is whether our elections can be.

**Go deeper:** Inside Trump's "super intelligence" naming problem

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