Good words and bad choices

‘I know words, I have the best words’ Trump boasted in a 2015 speech, and the internet’s scoffed at the irony ever since. Silly old Trump, right? Perhaps. But there’s another irony too. By sharing his quote so widely, we’ve also shown that in some sense, he is good with words. As Cardiff Garcia points out, ‘Trump’s … language — simple, visual, repetitive, bellicose — fits so well into [our] new’ era of media.

So what are Trump’s ‘best words’? He actually gives us an example of his preferred lingo in the same paragraph as his ‘I know words’ comment:

‘[Obama says] one of [his] achievements for the year is bringing peace to Syria and the whole world is talking about it. It is – the level of stupidity is incredible. I’m telling you, I used to use the word incompetent. Now I just call them stupid. I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words. I have the be – there is no better word than stupid.’

I think Trump’s right: stupid is better than incompetent. For starters, it’s simpler. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge warned, ‘whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad.’ One reason for that, though there are many others, is that simpler words are easier for listeners to digest, getting the message across better.

Another reason Trump’s right is that ‘stupid’ has some real wallop. To call someone incompetent sounds clever and patronising, but it still suggests they could learn something. Stupid bites deeper: it says they’re useless to the core. The word’s a gleeful mallet of condemnation.

Which is why Trump’s also wrong. There aren’t ‘best’ words, only apt ones, and ‘stupid’ is embarrassingly inapt. Obama et al. didn’t deserve such flattening damnation. Maybe they were rashly optimistic, or held worldviews that were too inflexible. Maybe they were trapped by their campaign promises of ending wars, or were too timid to get involved in them. But whatever was the case, Trump’s ‘stupid’ barges through these complications, unhelpful and wrong.

Why Trump succeeded and why Trump's failing,
all in one graph

Ultimately, Trump’s inapt because he’s a lazy thinker. Einstein said that ‘everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’ For Trump, though, everything must be reduced to stupid, great and sad. He doesn’t care to choose the right word, and probably couldn’t anyway. His message works on the internet and at rallies because it’s simple and rude, memorable and shareable. But its crudeness is the very reason it’s proving useless in Washington. It’s inapt, too simplistic for a complex world.