What Trump Is Doing to the English Language

Ms. Kaufman is the author of the forthcoming “Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing.”

“We’ve won,” President Trump announced at a rally on March 11, as the widening war in Iran started to rock oil markets and supply chains, and Iran escalated attacks on tankers and refineries across the Middle East.

“Let me tell you,” Mr. Trump insisted, “we’ve won.”

What did he mean? Mr. Trump’s use of the past participle of “win” expresses a completed action. “Win” can’t mean victory when ongoing fighting continues to throw the world economy into chaos. This instance is one of many in which Mr. Trump uses crisp, straightforward verbs to obfuscate.

As a critic and writing teacher, I’m fascinated by the tremendous power of verbs — language’s little fireballs — to shape how we understand the world. Verbs rule communication. Many linguists go so far as to see sentences as extensions of verbs with other accouterments.

I have observed a set of patterns in the way Mr. Trump speaks and writes over his two terms in office that reveal how the president uses verbs to evade responsibility and even proclaim a new form of leadership. Perhaps surprisingly, this is true even when Mr. Trump is proudly, if also prematurely, declaiming military successes.

“Win” and a set of other forceful action verbs and verb phrases — tell, hit, crush, destroy, knock out, kill, obliterate — account for much of the rock-ribbed, informal quality Mr. Trump invokes in his speech, which he did even before the country was at war with Iran. He whips up enormous rhetorical energy not from a large or sophisticated vocabulary but from the repeated use of dynamic verbs. The drama and emotion in his speech boil up largely from his choice of verbs — including the way he praises violent actions.

This reached a bizarre, vulgar crescendo in a late-night Truth Social post he made on March 13. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years,” he wrote of the Iranians, “and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”

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