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Donald Trump’s Twitter account is a huge part of his presidential campaign (Huge). The media quotes from it, his opponents try to score political points by making fun of it, and his fans / supporters constantly engage with its content. @realDonaldTrump is just that: a string of pronouncements that feel very (perhaps even a little too) real. As Britney Summit-Gil wrote back in December: “the beauty of Trump’s tweetability is that his fans don’t really care if he’s manicured or carefully crafted—it’s what they love about him. His tweets read just like his speeches sound. They’re off the cuff, natural, and engaging.”

I want to take a minute to dive into the powerful linguistic work that hides behind Trump’s natural and off the cuff style. Consider the following pair of tweets:

Here Trump’s campaign has attached what linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson would call “orientational metaphors.” These are very simple but powerful metaphors that help us interpret abstract concepts by embedding them in our embodied existence. “These spatial orientations arise” write Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors we Live By (1980), “from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have and that they function as they do in our physical environment.” For example the phrases “over your head” and “behind my back” mean that we either do not understand or have been intentionally left out of something. In the tweets above Trump gets a lot of mileage out of one of the most prominent orientational metaphors: up and down. Up is conscious, happy, healthy, and denotes control or force. Down is sad unconscious, sickly, and might mean one has lost control or lack’s the force to impose their will or is subject to another’s control (e.g. You are under my spell). Jeb is low energy, Rubio is Mr. meltdown. 

These tweets are obviously directed at his competitors, not the public in general, but these tweets say a lot about how Trump wants to be seen and what aspects of our humanity he’s playing off of to garner support. Someone with an eye towards theories of embodiment and the power dynamics around ableist language will already note that this kind of language privileges normative bodies and especially rewards those that are considered traditionally beautiful or otherwise desirable. This is completely true and it shows how far we have to go to dismantle all sorts of structural oppressions. (Let’s not forget all of the moral metaphors wrapped up in light and dark.)

Given all this it makes perfect sense that fascism always relies on plain, straight-forward language and the strict labeling of desirable and undesirable bodies. These two prerequisites are, in fact, one in the same move toward command-and-control power systems. Systems that do not deal in nuance, only brute force. This may also be why, according to the late Umberto Eco, fascism always induces skepticism (if not outright hatred) of academics or intellectual thinking. Do not mistake Trump’s simple language as mere branding, it is a harbinger of things to come.

David is on Twitter.

Image “low energy light bulb” credit: Alexander Ortweiler