Donald Trump is torturing the English language. Says New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, the president “is as inept at English as he is at governing,” adding, “He’s oxymoronic: a nativist who can’t really speak his native tongue.” What got Bruni riled up was not just the nonstop alt-right ravings, but also Trump’s constant misspellings, his oddball capitalization and bizarre punctuation, and his word-manglings like hamberder and covfefe.
Berating someone for making language mistakes is called "grammar shaming." Grammar shaming ordinary people doesn’t work: their English still won't meet your expectations and they'll resent your superior attitude. And there’s no point grammar shaming Trump because he’s incapable of feeling shame.
You may not like Trump's use of English--by the way, any linguist will tell you he does speak his native tongue--but the real problem with grammar shaming Trump is that it distracts us from the real problems of the language of his presidency: Trump broadcasts fascist tropes like fake news, human scum and enemy of the people. He calls anyone who disagrees with him sleepy, shifty, stupid, or a loser. He’s ratcheted up his use of unprintable gutter talk. Trump lies, deflects, makes things up, all the while hurling playground taunts at his rivals and his friends. These are serious and troubling in anyone, but for an American president to rave like like that in public is unprecedented and dangerous. Against all this, spelling doesn’t come close to counting.
Trump’s is the language of the bully, not the bully pulpit, and his message is a dogwhistle to bullies everywhere: grab what you want; push people around; scratch and claw and scream to get your way. And make them sign a nondisclosure agreement.
It’s always fair to deflate a blowhard and take down an inveterate insulter, whether in a schoolyard or at a baseball game. But trolling the president’s tweets with a red pencil reinforces the misleading notion that the only important ideas are the ones framed in standard English, and the only valid speakers are those with high SATs who’ve been approved by the language police.
Perhaps we’ve been spoiled after eight years of Barack Obama’s uplifting discourse, his measured tones, his big words and periodic sentences, and yes, his use of spell-check. But we’re faced with the reality that thanks to Trump and his base—base in every sense of the word—irrationality has replaced dialectic and political rhetoric in America is racing once again toward the bottom. It's the meaning of the words and ideas that are the danger, not how they’re spelled or punctuated. Would locking children up in cages and bribing foreign powers for dirt on political opponents be any more palatable couched in polysyllabic restrictive relative clauses with their commas in all the right places?
Instead of lambasting Trump for using an ill-considered apostrophe, then ridiculing him for calling it a hyphen, as he did in a recent tweet, some researchers pick apart Trump’s language to see if Trump or an aide wrote a particular tweet. The aides use more standard grammar and vocabulary, though they may drop in a misspelled word or botched phrase to add an air of authenticity. Other Trump watchers look to the tweets and speeches for signs of dementia: is he losing it? has he lost it? Read the tweet below, surely written by Trump unaided, and decide.
But if anything triggers the Twenty-Fifth Amendment or sways the needle on impeachment, it won’t be covfefe, discribing, or Liddle’. We can’t expect conventional literacy from Trump—though grammar peevers will point out that at least he manages to spell CNN correctly. Trump doesn’t read and he sees writing as just another blunt instrument for getting his way, so long as he doesn’t have to write more than 280 characters at a time. Trump tweets to get attention: he learned early on that being loud and flagrant would get him on the front page, whether it’s a newspaper or a Google search. I mean, searching “trump apostrophe” as I did just now yielded 610,000 hits. Covfefe got a whopping 2.74 million.
In the end, it won't be misplaced commas or made-up words that finally do Trump in. But it could be a phrase in a "perfect" phone call that is couched in perfect English, something like, oh, maybe, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
