Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Trump era arrived during the voted-out President’s most recent impeachment trial, with a video montage of prominent Democrats using the word fight. After four years of the defendant’s “I know you are but what am I?” playground logic, Americans heard his lawyers do the exact same thing in attempting to show that there was no difference between someone trying to steal an election and those trying to stop him from doing that. Somehow, telling a mob to go down to the Capitol and “fight like hell” on the day Congress was certifying electoral votes is the equivalent of using the word fight on MSNBC.

I doubt it mattered what kind of argument Trump’s legal team made. On February 13, 43 know-nothings in the Senate Chamber affirmed their knowing nothing of Constitutional law (Brandenburg v. Ohio, for instance, which holds that protected First Amendment rights do not include “inciting or producing imminent lawless action”) by acquitting the election’s loser of incitement of insurrection, the article of impeachment against him.

This was a pathos-drenched reprise of February 5, 2020, when Trump was acquitted of two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. During that painful episode, Nancy Pelosi told the Washington Post that she didn’t think the nation “should go down that path” because “he’s just not worth it.” I don’t know whether the politics or the logic of that statement is more troubling. When Congressional Democrats acted to prevent the future election of a president who had tried to subvert the will of the people, Senate Republicans certainly thought it was worth saving that president’s neck.

Everything with Doanld Trump seems to hang in the balance of words and their role in his lies. As a kid watching Masterpiece Theater costume dramas, I noticed that no matter what the series was about, there’d be a moment when some guy said: “You have my word.” Trump has no “word”; he has words. “There is no use indicting words,” wrote Samuel Beckett, “they are no shoddier than what they peddle.” Yet even the most benign words acquire a moral stain in service to Trump’s obscured message. His tangents and circumlocutions and his own meandering attention create a fog of meaning where what was previously unsayable is heard loud and clear by those who want to hear it.

For Donald Trump the real estate developer, words were the content of street hustle theater. Deception is achieved through a combination of innuendo, rhetorical evasion, and the intentional use of a low-literacy vocabulary to describe complex property transactions. When Trump established his lie-riffing in the 1970s, he may have had Muhammad Ali’s poetic preening in mind. To most New Yorkers, however, his obnoxious antics were closer to Jerry Carroll of the old Crazy Eddie commercials, waving his arms and shouting that “We CANNOT be undersold!” on audio equipment. Trump’s spoken exaggerations were worlds apart from the content of his NDAs, his endless preemptive litigation, and his claims that whomever he was currently victimizing was committing the very offenses he was perpetrating. We know the backstory.

When America blinked, Trump’s street hustle theater evolved into racist and anti-immigrant propaganda. Here was the king of bad-faith relationships, a ruthless, coldblooded man who understood the mix of the obtuse and the precise to inflame white grievance. When you are trying to establish a white nationalist autocracy using the language of democracy, stretching and contorting words on a torture rack is a necessity. The moment Trump took his oath to “American Carnage,” the clock began ticking on accountability and truth.

Trump’s constant stream of lies—whether outright falsehoods or shadowy rhetoric to obscure and undermine known fact—has devalued those aspects of our language that make it sharable and functional. Right before the election, the mainstream media fell over itself to defend Trump against Joe Biden’s claims that Trump had called the COVID pandemic a “hoax” and “fake news.”

What Trump said at a campaign rally on February 28, 2020, was this: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. . . . This is their new hoax.” Anyone listening knew the key words: “coronavirus” and “hoax.” That obfuscation of language is part of the lie. On October 26, 2020, Trump tweeted: “Cases up because we TEST, TEST, TEST. A Fake News Media Conspiracy. Many young people who heal very fast. 99.9%. Corrupt media conspiracy at all time high.” The takeaways: “fake news” that the number of cases is increasing; 99.9% of the cases are young people who won’t die; don’t believe the “corrupt media.”

The mainstream media has no capacity to straighten the crookedness of Trump’s words. His vocabulary of fighting and confrontation mimics that of a wartime president, and yet he seems unable to communicate to Americans anything that might be difficult or painful (e.g., blood, sweat, and tears). And if he does, there has to be someone or something to blame. All bad news is from the hands of Trump’s own enemies, and he is the only defender.

Trump paved his way for the Big Lie by expertly grooming a base that would endorse the overturning of an election on cue, like an enormous flock of starlings changing direction in unison in a split second. Congressional Republicans clinging to Trump’s coattails do not believe in the man the way that people in Massachusetts believed in David Ortiz. They are intoxicated by his perceived ability to bend reality to his will and feel no need to sober up. The attack on the Capitol was the physical culmination of years of Trump’s cues, and though the elected from both parties ran from their would-be attackers, only the Republicans knew when to pivot with the starlings.

Since the shock of January 6, it feels as if Trumpism has reached new ideological ground where democratic rhetoric isn’t even necessary. The strongman language of dominance is out there in the open, and Trump supporters no longer need to lie about anything but numbers. When the counting of the certified votes resumed late on January 6, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan repeated his bald-faced lie that 80 million Americans were questioning the election results. This was a handy number to lob since Trump would have won the popular vote if he had received 80 million of the votes cast and not 74,222,593.

One of the most absurd images of the 117th Congress was Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a face mask that read “CENSORED”—much like René Magritte’s surrealistic painting of a tobacco pipe proclaiming “This is not a pipe.” Senator Mitch McConnell also pulled a Magritte at Trump’s impeachment: after voting to acquit, he condemned the former president as “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of January 6.

Given how effectively Trump has taken a flamethrower to the words that support our democracy, what are they even worth in communicating the truth? Nancy Pelosi thought Trump was not worth the political capital of impeachment, but what are words worth?

So asks “Wordy Rappinghood,” an old song by the Tom Tom Club:

Words in papers, words in books
Words on TV, words for crooks
Words of comfort, words of peace
Words to make the fighting cease
Words to tell you what to do
Words are working hard for you
Eat your words but don’t go hungry
Words have always nearly hung me

Words have always nearly hung me is the story of Donald Trump’s life. “Grab’em by the pussy.” “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The key words are always and nearly, dancing around each other like tragedy and farce. Trump always gets out alive at the end because he knows to offload malicious intent onto everyone who engages with him at the very beginning. You have to wonder if any of the people who’ve signed his NDAs have ever assessed what their own words are worth. For money, fame, or whatever, they sign it all away.

Trump could not exist within a vacuum. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” It’s telling that his commodity was voters even before he was elected in 2016. His words have already transcended our system of justice: votes (legal or illicit) mean more than the law. Fortunately, this time we got by him on votes. But what about the future? I recently heard someone say “He gets out of everything. He’s like Houdini.” But it wasn’t everything Houdini got out of. He collapsed on stage while performing and later died of peritonitis. Nobody gets out of death. But before that time, there’s a lot more carnage for Donald Trump’s words to do. §