Beyond Orwell: The Trump Administration’s Assault On Political Language

Free Speech

from the contraspeak dept

The fallout over several Trump administration officials, all of them high-ranking, discussing military operations of a sensitive nature in a Signal chat and inadvertently welcoming a journalist to that chat is ongoing. The administration’s attempts to hand-wave this all away as unimportant doesn’t appear to be getting much traction, thankfully. The entire episode is a masterclass in failure: failure to adhere to rules about archivable communications among government staff, failure to adhere to even the most basic military OPSEC standards, and a failure to even be paying a basic amount of fucking attention to who is in this damned chat. It’s incompetence in the extreme.

But in defending these failures, as though they were some minor blip on a radar somewhere rather than extremely serious and important derelictions of duty, we can also get a glimpse into this administration’s wider assault on language. When it comes to the speech of politics, Orwell is referenced often, and for good reason. Language was a central theme in many of Orwell’s fictional works, but also a passion of his that made it into his non-fiction work as well. Politics and the English Language, published in 1946, serves as a companion piece to 1984, in which Orwell explains the danger of using analogies, euphamisms, or otherwise imprecise language when talking about policy. Here is one passage as an example.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

This is where the concept of “newspeak” comes from, as well as its evolved cousin, “doublespeak.” There’s an idiom in business that goes something like: where there is mystery, there is profit. In politics, however, where there is mystery, there is fuckery. If the communication to the public about a government action or policy is vague enough, or if a law is written imprecisely enough, that serves the machinations of the government at the peril of the people. If can obfuscate or soften a horrible action, permit the application of a law in a manner the public wouldn’t have intended, or build loopholes into government accountability. Newspeak and doublespeak, as I doubt anyone will argue, have been problems of American government for decades at least.

But this administration is engaging in something different. Gone is any ambiguous language in cases like the response to the Signal fiasco. Subtlety might as well be outlawed. And I would forgive anyone who might want simply call statements about this instance such as the following “lies.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that “nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say about that.” At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that “there was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said at the same hearing that “my communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.” Trump himself said the information shared was not classified.

Most, if not all of those statements, are false. Subsequent to those statements being made, the Atlantic released the text messages which show in plain English the erroneous nature of those statements. The one open question, a bit of gameplaying by these officials, is the question of the classified nature of the contents. As everyone but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been pointing out, Hegseth himself can declassify material at his whim. I am sure he will end up stating that he declassified that material prior to it being discussed on Signal, which will be plainly interpreted correctly as him protecting himself.

But these aren’t mere lies. They’re political messages that are intended to be repeated, both by the complicit members of conservative media willing to parrot the messages, and by members of the public willing to buy into the bullshit. With those dupes doing as the administration intends, the lies will echo throughout American politics until it’s all too noisy for the truth to break through. The lie isn’t meant to fool anyone. That’s plainly impossible in a case like this. It’s meant to take up at least half of the oxygen in a political arena so as to return the fallout from all of this back into a partisan knife fight.

First we had newspeak. Then we had doublespeak. This is contraspeak. Up is called down and left is called right, both of which are then repeated widely by partisans happy to help a government that doesn’t care about them weather the storm. That which is classified is referred to as the contrary. War plans, or battle plans if you prefer, are said to be something entirely different, even though they are not. And, through repetition, a land of make believe is created for one half of the political aisle to live in, like toddlers unwilling to accept the consequences of their own actions.

So, are these rebuttals from Trump officials related to the Signal debacle lies? Absolutely, yes. But they are so much more than that. They’re an assault both on the language of politics in America and the cynical employment of sycophantic pawns in what they view is a game.

And once you see it in this case, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

Filed Under: contraspeak, doublespeak, george orwell, lies, newspeak, pete hegseth, political speech, speech, war plans