The BBC's syntactical shiv

Steven Bannon is Trump’s chief strategist, and by all accounts he’s taking full advantage of the job the President’s given him. But many think he’s taking advantage of the President too. Time certainly thinks so, and recently ran a cover story on Bannon, labelling him ‘The Great Manipulator’. Bannon has even admitted his exploitative intentions. Trump is a ‘blunt instrument for us’, he told Vanity Fair last year, ‘I don’t know whether he really gets it or not’.

An eye on you, and an eye on something else

So influential is Bannon in the White House that ‘President Bannon’ has become a meme. ‘Impeach President Bannon’ signs have been sprouting up around America. In a recent Saturday Night Live skit, SNL’s grim-reaper version of Bannon asks Alec Baldwin’s Trump to give the Oval Office desk back. Baldwin gets up from the desk with a deferential, ‘Yes of course, Mr President’.

And now even the BBC seems unsure about who’s in charge. At the head of an article yesterday, they wrote:

The chief strategist to President Donald Trump has said that his election victory has ushered in a “new political order”.

Wait, whose election victory was the chief strategist referring to? Does the ‘his’ mean Trump or Bannon?

This linguistic fiddle is caused by a ‘dangling modifier’. A modifier (e.g. ‘his election victory’) dangles when it’s not clear what it refers to (‘the chief strategist’ or ‘President Donald Trump’?) If I said, ‘Walking down Main Street, the trees were beautiful’, you might wonder whether I was taking a springtime walk, or whether some Ents were migrating. Or take the sentence, ‘I saw the truck peeking through the window.’ Who was peeking, me or the truck? (Thanks to Wikipedia for these examples.)

Answer: the truck was peeking

In most cases, dangling modifiers are accidental and can be resolved from the general context. But in the BBC’s case, the dangling might be deliberate and its uncertainty might resist resolution. After all, by referring to Bannon as a ‘chief strategist’, the BBC is emphasising his cunning. Maybe it was the chief strategist’s election victory. Maybe he can co-opt the president. Maybe it’s his ‘new political order’ too. Maybe. The dangling modifier seems to be intentionally ambiguous, a syntactical question mark over Bannon’s influence.

If it is, I think the BBC’s right to worry. He’s paranoid and fiery, so Trump listens to Bannon. The world may well suffer for it.