Former President Donald Trump is once again using hard-to-pin-down language to telegraph authoritarian ideas. This time we ought to be vigilant about how Trump knows exactly what he’s doing in these situations — and why it’s such an insidious rhetorical strategy.
Trump told a gathering of conservative Christians on Friday that if they got him into office, they would never have to vote again. “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” he pleaded at The Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Trump is once again playing a game that he knows how to play very well.
Coming from a man who sought to overturn election results and pledges to be a “dictator for one day,” Trump’s comments raised eyebrows. A few days later, Fox News host Laura Ingraham tried to gently coax Trump multiple times into stating that his Friday remarks did not mean that he had any intentions to try to stay in office forever. This turned out to be a struggle.
“They’re saying that you said to a crowd of Christians that they won’t have to vote in the future,” Ingraham began, in an effort to prompt Trump to clarify his position. He replied first with a completely unrelated tangent about how Christians love him and Jews should vote for him, before finally addressing the question like this:
“I said, ‘Vote for me, you’re not gonna have to do it ever again.’ It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them: ‘You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.’”
Ingraham again prompted Trump with an opportunity to rule out anything more sinister: “You mean you don’t have to vote for you, because you’ll have four years in office.” Trump launched into a tangential point about gun owners, which Ingraham interrupted once more to goad Trump to address her point: “It’s being interpreted, as you are not surprised to hear, by the left as, ‘Well, they’re never going to have another election’ … Can you even just respond to that?”
Trump then repeated a similar set of points describing his pitch to his audience at the Christian rally: “You have to vote on Nov. 5. After that you don’t have to worry about voting any more. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it, the country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote any more because, frankly, we will have such love. If you don’t want to vote anymore that’s OK. And I think everybody understood it,” the former president said.
In a later exchange, Trump finally answered yet another attempt by Ingraham to get a clear answer: “But you will leave office after four years?”
Trump responded, almost under his breath, “Of course.”
He continued: “By the way. I did last time. I kept hearing, ‘He’s not going to leave, he’s not going to leave.’ Look, they are the ones that are a threat to democracy.”
To sum it up: Trump overwhelmingly doubled down on messaging that hints at despotism, and even his eventual reluctant acknowledgment of a four-year term was marred by a huge caveat that raises questions about how serious the acknowledgement even was.
Trump is once again playing a game that he knows how to play very well, by exploiting the way that language can be layered with multiple meanings at the same time. In particular, he deploys words and phrases with ripe subtexts that could encourage extreme behavior, and then relies on being able to retreat to the less extreme interpretation of the language as a way to maintain plausible deniability.
Trump’s polysemic signaling puts the media in a bind. Reporters, analysts and commentators debate how much charity to extend to Trump when he uses ambiguous language, and often have to explain to the public that it is impossible to know where Trump stands on that spectrum of meaning. In this case, for example, Trump’s use of “fix” could apply to making the country more aligned with conservative Christian principles (which is in and of itself alarming), or it could refer to rigging elections. The problem of Trump’s slippery language will never really go away, because it is the responsibility of the media to share facts (what Trump is saying) and acknowledge complexity (Trump could be referring to multiple ideas). His traps are effective.
Trump has done this before to great effect. Think about how he helped lure rioters to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by promising it would be “wild.” And how, right before his supporters stormed the building, he told them to “fight like hell.” Trump has relied on how these phrases can be interpreted literally or euphemistically to both encourage extremism and defend himself from accusations (including in his Senate impeachment trial) of inciting an insurrection.
Trump also has a track record of refusing to condemn extremism in high-profile media appearances, allowing him to use triangulation to tacitly endorse extremist behavior. Recall how in a 2016 interview Trump refused to distance himself from the support of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; even after it was explained to him who Duke was, Trump simply kept repeating he didn’t know who Duke was. (Trump was feigning ignorance: he had said in 2015 that he did not want Duke’s endorsement.) Or consider Trump’s use of “very fine people on both sides” to suggest that some people at a white supremacist event were OK by floating a specious claim about what the event was about.
Now we’ve seen a similar dynamic with Trump’s speech and his interview with Fox News. Trump hammered home a controversial line at a speech. He then constantly refused to admit why his language could’ve been taken the wrong way, before he finally issues a two-word acknowledgement that he would leave office after four years — and then immediately undermines it by noting how he left office after four years in his first term. Trump of course only left because he failed to overturn the election. Trump’s revisionism, combined with arguing that the left is the true enemy of democracy, is ominous foreshadowing and should be taken seriously as such.
Lastly, one must remember that Trump often uses humor and irony as a vessel for sharing his most extreme and antisocial ideas on everything from election rigging to attacking the media, using the possibility that he’s not being “serious” as a way to telegraph nefarious ideas. In his speech Trump sounded playful and ironic in his pledges to “my beautiful Christians” and his promise that they’ll never have to vote again. But his comments also function as a trial balloon for his supporters to consider an endless Trump presidency. It’s the same with “dictator for one day,” and countless other statements.
This is not a case against sharing the facts of Trump’s actual language, and the context in which they emerge. It’s a case against endless conjecture about the true meaning behind Trump’s language. When it comes to language that sits on the edge of propriety or democratic norms, Trump is conveying exactly what he wants to. One need not choose between taking his language seriously or literally, or between settling on the narrower or most capacious meanings. The different meanings are functioning in concert with one another, serving as a shield and sword, activating militants while maintaining a veneer of restraint. Know that Trump thrives off the confusion he sows, and uses it as a smokescreen to pursue the will to power.
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