Defending the indefensible
Trump figures assault the language, along with much more
As a new world order was emerging in late 1945, Eric Arthur Blair wrote “Politics and the English Language,” publishing it under his pen name, George Orwell. But he could have been speaking to our day -- a time when yet another world order may be taking shape.
One of the British writer’s most insightful sentences was: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”
Torturing the language is a key part of such political speech, Orwell suggested. And nowadays we have rafts of examples from the administration of Donald J. Trump. Almost daily, he and his minions give us tons of “newspeak,” another term Orwell used in other work for euphemism, circumlocution and the inversion of customary usages.
Consider, for instance, the case of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who Vice President JD Vance insists was not “arrested,” but rather was “detained.” Indeed, the agents were acting compassionately, Vance suggested, since the alternative was to “let a 5-year-old child freeze to death.”
And the boy was not the target, he said, but rather that was his father, “illegal alien” Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias.
Never mind that the pair entered the U.S. legally in 2024 from Ecuador and applied for asylum, as their lawyer reported. And never mind that the child was used as bait to nab the father as the pair returned from preschool, according to Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of the child’s school district, Columbia Heights Public Schools, a suburb of Minneapolis.
And don’t think that the pair are being held in a jail, prison or even a detention center. Rather they are staying in a “family residential center,” the South Texas Family Residential Center, in Dilley, Texas.
This “residential center,” which was shut down by the Biden Administration and reopened in March by Trump, is also a model facility, according to ICE. It “respects the dignity and humanity of families awaiting the outcome of immigration hearings or pending return to home country. Individuals can roam freely throughout the facility to playrooms, snack areas with continually restocked refrigerators, libraries, exercise rooms, lobbies, etc.,” the agency said in 2019.
Never mind that “residents” of the 2,400-person facility have compIained that the place’s food is contaminated with worms and mold and that there is limited access to clean drinking water and inadequate medical care. And take no note that, according to a Texas Tribune report, “The tap water is cloudy, smells strange and upsets stomachs … The hand soap the facility provides for showers has been causing rashes.” Ignore the facts that “detainees” are charged $1.21 for bottled water, 5.73 for deodorant, $1.44 for soap, and $2.39 for toothpaste and “$1.30 for a dose of Tylenol.
This “family residential center” is ringed by concrete and chain-linked fences. Its “residential supervisors,” as the place’s private-sector operator, CoreCivic, calls them, are more commonly called “guards.” Surveillance is constant. And yet, officials won’t call this by what appears to be a more apt term, a prison camp for immigrants such as Liam Ramos and his father, as such folks await “expedited removal” from the country.
Modern political language – especially that of Trump and minions – fits Orwell’s descriptions to a tee. The phrasing “has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” the writer observed.
And sometimes, it’s just downright dishonest. Thus, murdered Renee Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism” and had “weaponized her vehicle,” according to Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem. This “deranged leftist,” in the phrase used by Vance, “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer,” as Trump insisted.
Never mind that her killer, Jonathan D. Ross, inappropriately put himself in front of Good’s car as she turned away from him. Forget that he moved to the side of her car as he shot her three times. And disregard the fact that her final words to him included the hardly incendiary or even uncivil phrase “that’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”
For mastery of phrasing that disregards or misshapes the truth, Attorney General Pam Bondi is also a top contender. The recent disruption of services at the Cities Church by 30 to 40 protesters was a “coordinated attack,” Bondi said. In Trump’s terms, the protesters were “agitators and insurrectionists.” A Homeland Security press release called the protest “a planned riot,” though no property damage, physical assaults or injuries were reported.
When a federal magistrate judge rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to bring charges against journalist Don Lemon, Bondi was reportedly enraged. The former CNN anchor was on the scene livestreaming the protest as an independent journalist. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon suggested he was, in fact, part of a criminal conspiracy. “He went into the facility, and then he began — quote, unquote — ‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t,” Dhillon said, according to The Washington Post.
Dhillon, readers may recall, refused to open a civil rights investigation into Good’s murder, driving four staffers to quit the unit. Under Dhillon, the civil rights division has lost about half its 380 attorneys, as she has shifted the division’s mission to attack alleged anti-American discrimination by employers who hire foreign-born workers.
Dhillon may be a key figure in the prosecution of the Cities Church protesters. She said on X that her division will probe potential federal law violations by those “desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers.” Never mind that “desecration” usually refers to defacement or physical damage, not shouting during a service — however appropriate or inappropriate that may be.
Acting ICE director Todd Lyons echoed and expanded on Trump’s terms for the demonstrators, saying, “President Trump made it clear that under his administration, these anarchists, these domestic terrorists, won’t disrupt law and order, and especially won’t disrupt a house of worship,” according to CNN.
Far from being an anarchist, however, one of the protesters arrested was Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and former president of the Minneapolis NAACP chapter. Another, Chauntyll Louisa Allen, is a member of the St. Paul School Board who ran for city council in St. Paul last year, where her priorities included community safety, economic stability and creating more housing.
Accuracy and presenting the full picture is not what Trumpists are about, though. Other terms come to mind for their assaults on language: mischaracterization, misrepresentation, dishonesty, falsehood, perhaps. Of course, as Trump himself has long demonstrated, an acquaintance with the truth is not an essential ingredient for a successful politician. In his administration, it seems like a shortcoming.
Tragically, the distortions can hurt us all and how we see the truth. As Orwell put it, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”