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After weeks of covering updates on the Iran war from the Trump administration — and Trump’s own missives on social media — I keep coming back to the same impression: words have no meaning.
Words have always been twisted by the MAGA crew; their definitions have always been stretched and strained. But now, six weeks after the US started bombing Iran, days after the president wrote “Open the F—IN’ Strait, you crazy bastards” on Truth Social and only a few short hours since he promised “a whole civilization will die tonight,” the language has truly suffered some grave and irreversible casualties.
In a White House briefing that bizarrely — given that we are at war — opened with an announcement about AI legislation supported by Melania Trump, press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated many of the lines we heard from Pete Hegseth at eight o’clock this morning: America has won against Iran; “a historically swift and successful military triumph” has been achieved; the media is lying (or possibly being fed lines directly from Iran) if they say anything negative about it; bombing Iran provided America with “maximum leverage.”
Of course, we’ve moved way beyond trying to explain that hitting your smaller opponent in the face repeatedly and then threatening to kill them if they don’t do what you say isn’t cleverly negotiating your way to “maximum leverage,” and is instead something that literally anybody could do, but that doesn’t matter. Because now is the time for The Grand, Overarching Narrative. And although both Leavitt and Hegseth have been desperate to push the Trump-as-dealmaker narrative, that is not the narrative most people are interested in. Instead, most people are interested in the Trump-as-unhinged-maniac narrative, as bolstered by the Truth Social posts mentioned earlier, and by the more than 100 lawmakers currently calling to invoke the 25th Amendment.
And so, as soon as Leavitt opened up the floor to questions, the floodgates opened.
Karoline Leavitt did her best to dodge answering on Wednesday when repeatedly pressed to explain Trump’s Muslim-baiting and civilian-threatening rhetoric from over the weekend (AP)
What was actually achieved that would benefit the American people, asked one reporter? Well, Leavitt said, six weeks ago the president “looked the American people in the eye directly” (surely an incredible feat in itself) and promised them he would go to war for their benefit. And he did, because we say so. Because the Iranians’ initial 10-point plan isn’t actually what the ceasefire was brokered around: instead, that plan was one Trump “literally threw in the garbage,” despite obviously not being in the negotiating room. And just believe me, the deal he did make is fantastic.
But why, asked another journalist in the room, was it appropriate for Trump to openly threaten genocide before the deal was struck? “What the president cares most about is results,” Leavitt replied, and Trump’s “very tough” rhetoric is effective, so none of that matters, since we have a “very powerful and lethal military.”
Does that mean the world shouldn’t take Trump seriously when he says things, came the natural follow-up? No, replied Leavitt, the world should take Trump very seriously — but she couldn’t explain why, and instead talked around the point before quickly moving on.
Reporters for this administration are used to having to take Leavitt’s scraps and make dinner from them, but this wasn’t even a scrap. So The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg pressed the point, asking how America — historically a country that sees itself as a moral leader — can possibly have the high ground in international affairs when its president threatens to wipe out an entire civilisation.
Leavitt was clearly ill at ease by this point. Again, she started talking around the point without saying anything of meaning, until she eventually landed on: “The president has the moral high ground over the Iranian regime,” and for Feinberg to say otherwise was disgraceful. Truly, how dare he! (One might, indeed, wonder why Leavitt didn’t say that America, with its values of liberty, tolerance, democracy and justice for all, has the moral high ground over the Iranian regime, but this is a question few of us have the energy to hear answered right now.)
The words were piling up, and none of them were satisfactory.
It’s clear that both Hegseth and Leavitt have their own rhetoric written by the same person, or at least have them brainstormed in the same room, because the crimes against language are all the same: the straw man fallacies, the repeated use of the word “decimated,” the adolescent openers that usually double up as puns (Leavitt’s today was that Iran’s “murderous and evil plans have been blown up, quite literally”), the stuff about Iranians “chanting ‘Death to America’.”
You can get away with a lot of this kind of repetition in government, except when you’re giving briefings multiple times a week about the exact same conflict: then, it starts to look sloppy and you start to look awfully like you’re flailing around for something to say rather than responding to the moment.
Towards the end of the presser, Leavitt announced that she was going to share a “direct quote” from the president about NATO allies: “They were tested, and they failed.” Many have already pointed out that NATO is a defensive agreement, not an attack agreement. Indeed, the very first line of the NATO agreement should have made that clear to the president: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
But of course, those are just words. And in a world where wiping out a civilisation isn’t genocide, and a tenuous ceasefire with unclear terms is actually a decisive victory, and HANG ON, did you just imply that Trump doesn’t have the moral high ground over Iran?! Well, in this world, words have been decimated, and our very lethal military has put them in their place. If you ask about words again, we will look you in the eye and literally throw you in the garbage before destroying your civilisation.
Anyway: on to Cuba.
