Trump White House official at work on government website
As a recent New York Times article (reprinted here at Yahoo! news) indicates, one of the many areas where President Joe Biden is trying to undo the extensive damage done by Donald Trump is the language used by our federal government. Obviously, Trump and his minions agreed with what we have written about here for more than 10 years, i.e. that “messaging matters” and, in particular, that Republicans are experts at framing issues in ways that favor their point of view. Part of this framing is the use of certain loaded words and phrases. While Trump was in the White House and not busy playing golf, he liked to use Nazi propaganda tactics such as the repetition of big lies, and he had his federal government employ loaded words, or prohibit the use of other words, to gain political advantage. The two areas where this seems most prevalent were, perhaps not surprisingly, the politically contentious subjects of immigration and the environment/climate change. Take a look after the jump to see what Trump did, and how Biden is trying to repair the damage:
Immigration — this should not even be a hot-button issue, but Republicans have turned it into one, perhaps as a way to distract middle class and lower income voters from GOP policies tilted heavily toward wealthy donors and big business. Many people remember that Donald Trump began his entire presidential campaign by bashing immigrants, even calling them criminals, drug mules and rapists. Trump followed up that entrance with his government’s playing up of terms such as “illegal alien” and “radical Islamic terrorism,” as well as removing the Spanish language version of the main WhiteHouse.gov website.
Soon after taking office, however, President Biden has taken steps to reverse this hostile Trump language and the climate that it created, including using “noncitizen” and “undocumented immigrant” in place of “illegal alien.” These are considered less discriminatory terms that many Democrats already like to use to describe people who did not come to America by normal legal immigration channels. Likewise, the front page at WhiteHouse.gov now has a big “Español” tab back in place up top.
Climate Change — note that in Florida, the tip of the spear of approaching climate change devastation in the U.S., then-Governor (now U.S. Senator) Rick Scott, a Republican, got a head start on the war on language back in 2015, reportedly banning state governmental use of the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” The Trump administration followed Scott’s lead by removing references to and information on “climate change” from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other government websites, and even featuring a photo of “a huge wall of coal” at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) website. The Biden administration has now changed this language in question, restoring “climate change” and references to relying on “science.” And that photo of a pile of coal is now a lovely winding river.
There are many other examples of Donald Trump and members of his administration using language in a loaded, attacking, or distracting manner. One such example that comes to mind is Trump’s referral to the Coronavirus as the “Chinese Virus,” the “Foreign Virus” or the “Wuhan Virus,” which Trump and some of his officials liked to use at the very time they were doing nothing about COVID except downplaying its deadly effects in America. President Biden and his officials can be counted on to treat these subjects with honesty, which is a necessary step in solving rather than denying or politicizing a problem. To that end, U.S. COVID vaccinations are now running over 2 million per day.
The Trump administration’s loaded use of language was, at bottom, a childish tactic akin to putting one’s hands over one’s ears and shouting, “nah nah, I can’t hear you!” Obviously, such Republican denial of certain words, and substituting them with Republican ideological terms, did not solve any problems described by those words. Once again, the Democrats now running the White House and U.S. Senate along with the U.S. House will have to act like the adults in the room, and fix these issues that Republicans are unwilling or unable to address in a rational way.
Photo by Jemima Gibbons, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/2Qgwjl
