In Trump’s Washington, a War of Wordplay Takes Hold

Of all the changes underway in Washington, one of the deepest has to do with the very language that is spoken here. In order to remake the government, President Trump and his administration are remaking the language used to describe the government.

An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by the president and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak.

One presidential order titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government” calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” demands that “patriotic education” be taught to children.

“Forced patriotism is indoctrination — those words are synonyms,” said Lee Rowland, a First Amendment attorney and the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to free speech. She said that the education executive order “is a perfect encapsulation of what we are seeing out of this administration so far, which is to diminish rights while claiming as a matter of pure rhetoric that they are increasing them.”

Across government, a war is being waged in wordplay. It is fought in executive orders, official statements from the White House, press briefings and all manner of communiqués, internal and external. The very language that Mr. Trump and his administration are using to smash the federal bureaucracy is now also the official language of that bureaucracy, because it is being dictated by the man doing the smashing.

“He’s coming up with his own executive language which is then directed as a weapon against the supposed internal enemy, which is the structure of government,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor whose books include “How Propaganda Works” and “The Politics of Language.”