White House Words: Orwellian Newspeak to Distract the Masses

The American electorate did not cast their votes for Elon Musk in the 2024 general election. Reshaping the federal government was just a twinkle in Trump’s eye, paired with often concocted tales aimed at specific constituencies. Those of us outside of the MAGA orbit worried more about draconian measures aimed at brown people and Trump’s thirst for revenge.

We didn’t vote for disbanding the Department of Education. We didn’t vote for higher credit card interest rates and hidden charges. We didn’t vote for a reawakening of this nation’s imperialistic past. We didn’t vote for demonizing and prosecuting people and corporations stepping up for more inclusivity. But that’s what we’re getting in spades.

The situation is worse than many people think, thanks to a depressing number of media outlets deciding it was in their best interests to play nice in the face of evil.

Key to understanding the impacts of Musk/Trump actions is parsing the words being flung at us. Legacy media isn’t always afraid to chronicle the excesses of the current administration, but they all-too-often are packaged to impact sensibilities in ways different than the import of what occurred.

Take the Presidential press event on Tuesday, February 11th. The President said some things, but allowed his billionaire sidekick to dominate the session. A media op not all about Trump is unheard of. Musk spoke 3,666 words. Trump spoke 2,487 words. Musk’s child-of-the-moment stood by and picked his nose as the President sat hunched over his desk.

“The least someone could have done was give Trump a coloring book and some crayons to keep busy while President Musk answered questions,” wrote Campaign for New York Health executive director Melanie D’Arrigo. (via New Republic)

A big point of the Musk/Trump show that day was the assertion DOGE was finding fraud everywhere it looked. Below is a list of the verified instances found:

Words matter, both in the impression they create and the silence they can surround. George Orwell called this construct of language Newspeak.

As the media recorded the events in the Oval Office, a match was tossed in the direction of the First Amendment. Words were the flint it struck, and the striker hoped the danger that fire posed would strike fear among those charged with chronicling history in the making.

The President was pleased to display a Google map with the words Gulf of America displayed on the depiction of the seas south of the United States. What he didn’t know is that nomenclature wasn’t being seen by people in the other countries bordering that body of water.

(Google labels things by local custom or legal definition) For the rest of the world, it’s still Gulf of Mexico.

An Associated Press reporter was excluded by the White House from that Oval Office Q&A + Executive Order signing, as was true for another newsworthy occasion later in the day. Their company’s sin was failing to relabel the Gulf Of Mexico according to the Presidential proclamation.

Aside– The AP camera person was allowed in the White House. The Associated Press is a non-profit corporation owned by its members, and a primary source for national and international reporting by newspapers throughout the world.

Here’s what their style guide says:

The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.

This drama, on the surface, was much ado about nothing. Yet it was a significant moment, a testing of the waters to see if this new White House could get away with in regard to the First Amendment without causing a furor.

Here’s Brian Stelter at Reliable Sources, a CNN Newsletter:

• In the past few weeks the administration has deleted the White House’s Spanish-language website; stated that the government recognizes "only two genders;" and directed agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts. As a result of Trump's edicts, employees have been fired; websites have been removed; and scientific papers have been withdrawn.

• Language is at the heart of this overhaul. At agencies like the National Science Foundation, workers reviewed active projects with a list of keywords "to determine if they include activities that violate executive orders" issued by Trump. "The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like 'trauma,' 'barriers,' 'equity' and “excluded,'" the Washington Post reported last week.

• In "1984," Syme tells Winston that "the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought." I know Trump loyalists would argue that they're doing the opposite, and making it easier to think freely, by reversing progressives' language-policing. I'll leave that debate to others. But I want to recognize that language – from the meaning of the word "censorship" to the name of the Gulf – is at the very heart of Trump's scorched-earth approach to governance, and right now, he's winning the war of words.

Speaking of words, our new Attorney General Pam Bondi apparently doesn’t know the difference between criminal charges and civil lawsuits. She went before cameras on Wednesday to proclaim she’s filed “charges” against the state of New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, NY Attorney General Letitia James, and the state's motor vehicles commissioner Mark Schroeder.

Bondi did not provide many details of the specific laws that she said New York had broken but said its policies were undermining and hindering law enforcement, including from running background checks on potentially violent offenders brown people in the country illegally.

The use of words and the cluelessness of their speakers brings to mind a couple of doozies from the House of Representatives.

Georgia Republican Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter has introduced legislation designed to amplify Donald Trump’s widely scoffed at notion to buy Greenland. The bill would authorize the president to begin negotiations to acquire the sovereign territory and “rename Greenland as ‘Red, White, and Blueland.’”

Aside– According to The Guardian, 200,000 Danes have signed a satirical petition to buy California from the US in response to Trump's attempts to buy Greenland.

“We’ll bring hygge to Hollywood, bike lanes to Beverly Hills and organic smørrebrød to every street corner. Rule of law, universal healthcare and fact-based politics might apply,” the petition reads.

Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna wants the congressional task force on the Kennedy assassination to question key investigators, including physicians who examined him and members of the Warren Commission. But there’s going to be a bit of difficulty, besides wasting money on beating a dead mule.

All seven members of the Warren Commission are dead, as are the majority of counsels who worked on it. Also deceased are the doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas – Charles Baxter, Robert McClelland, and Malcolm Perry – who examined Kennedy when he was brought in after being mortally wounded. Later that day, an autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital by Drs. James Humes and Thornton Boswell, who are also dead.

Sometimes the Musk/Trump minions are too busy to use words. Probationary employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are being laid off via a form letter that doesn’t include their names. “MEMORANDUM FOR (EmployeeFirstName) (EmployeeLastName),” the letter says. “This is to provide notification that I am removing you from your position of (JobTitle).” Remember folks, cruelty is the point for MAGAts and Musketeers.

Sometimes the DOGE bags forget to use the right words. Musk has been waving around a report showing huge potential issues in government payments as part of justifying the shut down of USAID.

If you happened to actually read said report, two things jump out:

• It was prepared by the Government Accountability Office under President Joe Biden.

• payments the report identifies are potential false claims made to Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance, which the Musk team hasn’t gotten around to looking at.

Meanwhile, Weenie Democrats are bitching about all the words coming over their phone lines from constituents. Via Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

• Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill held closed door meetings where they complained that voters from around the country are organizing and asking them to be stronger in resisting President Donald Trump’s harmful agenda.

• Axios reports that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attended the meetings in question, along with members of the House Steering & Policy Committee. The outlet reports that a senior House Democrat told them that Jeffries is “very frustrated” at activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible that have helped concerned Americans make phone calls to congressional offices.

• The source added that “people are pissed” that Democrats are receiving pressure to significantly increase their opposition to Trump.

Mike Brock at Notes From the Circus had this response:

• While Rome burns, they're busy drafting strongly-worded letters to the arsonists, pausing only to scold the citizens who dare suggest using the fire extinguishers. Their position would be merely comedic if it weren't so catastrophically dangerous—like watching someone respond to a home invasion by suggesting the burglar fill out a visitor's form.

• “What leverage do we have?” Jeffries asks—apparently unaware that he's providing his own epitaph. The leverage of moral clarity. The leverage of democratic legitimacy. The leverage of millions of citizens demanding their representatives actually represent them. But perhaps that's too much to expect from leaders who've grown so comfortable in their donor-funded cages that they mistake their chains for jewelry.

Use Your Words. Protect this country: use your voice to push elected leaders of both parties to fight for our democracy. Contact your elected officials via Five Calls. The site makes it easy for you to communicate with your elected representatives.

Jan. 6 video evidence has 'disappeared' from public access, media coalition says Via Tom Dreisbach at NPR

• "A lot of politicians' careers now depend on the record of the attack on the Capitol being rewritten," said Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases. "Making these exhibits widely available will make it harder for people to hide the history of what happened on January 6."

• Over the course of the Jan. 6 criminal cases, the group of media organizations that made this filing fought for — and won — access to court exhibits from the government through an online platform similar to Dropbox.

• Recently, one of the attorneys noticed the files from Simon's case were no longer available, according to their filing

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Crossing a line - Borders between one kind of life and another by Timothy Snyder at Thinking About…

• I am one American in a train at night in a foreign country at war, heading in the direction of the front, going to a city that is attacked by Russia. But I know that I won’t be crossing any lines. It is nearing midnight, and aside from the sound of the wheels on the rails, all is calm. I know where this train will stop. I am traveling with people I know, visiting people I trust, aiming to do something that makes sense — helping to celebrate the opening of an underground school in Zaporizhzhia (Russia targets schools with missiles, and so they must go underground, in a literal sense). As I close my tablet and go to sleep, I am safer than every single one of you reading this in the United States, and indeed safer than I would be in the United States. My train will stop in five hours. But America will keep hurtling.

• Two cars down sleeps a Ukrainian soldier. Spare a thought for him and for the other Ukrainian soldiers on my train, on their way to the front. They are, in every sense of the word, holding a line, not only for themselves and their country, but for all of us. But for their resistance, it would be a worse and more tyrannical world. They have been giving us a chance to stay on our side of the line for three years now, and at horrible cost. By comparison to what they have done for us, we have done very little for them.

• Think about what lines you will cross and that you will not cross. They are not as obvious, perhaps, as a line on a map, or a line of trenches at the front. But we cannot pretend that they are not there. And if we cross them, we will no longer be ourselves.

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The Emperor’s New Tariffs: Small, Ugly and Stupid by Paul Krugman

• Our deficit with Canada is less than a third than Trump imagines; in fact, it’s smaller than our trade deficit with Ireland.

• What? Ireland? Why do we run a huge deficit with the Emerald Isle? The answer is, we don’t. These are essentially fake numbers, caused by corporate tax avoidance: companies use artificially high or low prices in transactions between their subsidiaries to make it seem as if they’re earning most or all of their profits in Ireland, which has a low corporate tax rate. In this case, I suspect that a lot of the supposed trade imbalance comes from fictitiously high prices charged by the Irish subsidiaries of pharmaceutical companies. (Technology companies also shift profits to Ireland, but mainly by playing games with intellectual property.)

• Which brings me to another way in which Trump’s policies have been hurting our economic future. Freezes and ideological purges have brought much of America’s biomedical research to a dead halt. This is, above all, a human tragedy. But it will also have major economic consequences. America’s biopharmaceutical sector, which ultimately depends on the research base Trump is destroying, is substantially bigger than steel and aluminum combined:

Note to Subscribers: The unrelenting pace of events of the Musk/Trump 2.0 regime is having the effect of pushing my publication time back to later in the morning. Frankly, having to digest all the data, decide on themes/focus, fact check, and background research, is adding to my stress level on top of concerns about the fate of the nation.

So, as of this week, I’m going to try writing my columns the day before publication and doing the email/social media distribution early in the morning on the day of posting. There’s another reason for this change: emails received earlier in the day consistently get more engagement.

I’m not 100% sure of how this will work out, but I’m willing to give it a try. If anything earth-shaking arises overnight I will still have the option of editing the column to include it or doing a second posting later in the day.

Thank you all very much for continuing to read and share Words & Deeds.