There’s no transforming America’s pig male
Donald Trump was in the news in mid-summer for the cold-blooded manslaughter of the English tongue. O.K., that’s hyperbole, and I’m not Henry Higgins, but what Trump said got my attention. President Do Little, who has described himself as “being, like, really smart,” used a simile.
Of the coronavirus, Trump said on August 5, “It will go away like things go away.” (In a much bigger story that broke September 9, Trump, according to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, acknowledged on February 7 that COVID-19 was a deadly virus and that his approach was to “play it down.” Three weeks later, Trump called the virus a hoax.)
The American Heritage Dictionary defines simile as “a figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in: He was as strong as a bull.” Not “He was as strong as a thing.”
“It will go away like things go away.” What does that say about an imagination so bereft that it cannot complete a simple simile? Cannot think of a specific “thing” to compare it to?
“It will go away like things go away.” What things? The coronavirus will go away like the sunset goes away? Like global warming goes away? Like the debasement of the law by the leader of the free world goes away?
In Trump’s metaphorical American Carnage inaugural address he spoke of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape.” That might have sounded profound at the time to Trump and Stephen Miller, but “landscape” is a word favored by cliché lovers, language manglers, and the unimaginative. You see it everywhere—the political landscape, the sports landscape, the business landscape, the sports business landscape—except perhaps in horticultural writing.
Nina Burleigh in Newsweek in 2018 wrote of a study that found Trump “communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents…according to an analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.”
Burleigh wrote, “The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels.”
The study concluded that “Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.”
Still, I know and have taught fourth graders with more proficient and sophisticated language skills than Trump, who is condemned by every syllable he utters. To paraphrase Frederick Loewe, “Trump’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other American despise him.”
Anyone who has listened to Trump’s propaganda briefings is familiar with the President’s limited vocabulary. He favors the adjectives “tremendous” and “fantastic,” often attaching “very” one or more times to the front of them. Describing his fiscal policy during his first presidential debate, against Hillary Clinton, Trump said, “I’m going to cut taxes bigly, and you’re going to raise taxes bigly.” Some listeners thought he said “big league.” But it was reported that Trump told his supporters, “We’re going to win bigly” and that Iran was “taking over [Iraq] bigly.”
Trump also overuses “incredible,” which is probably fitting, given that much of what he says is not believable, and uses “incredibly” as a synonym for “very.”
Now, you might wonder, “What’s a little language abuse for a President who has abused his oath of office, the Constitution, and the laws of decency?” You might also conclude that such a slovenly disregard for the written and spoken word is a reflection of the man who has contempt for science and medicine, as evidenced by the health crisis his negligence has exacerbated and that has claimed nearly 200,000 American lives, for which he admitted that he takes no responsibility.
In Hamlet, Claudius tells Gertrude, “But, like the owner of a foul disease,/To keep it from divulging, let it feed/Even on the pith of life.” That’s a simile.
Here’s another: In Julius Caesar, Marc Antony compares Caesar's wounds to mouths: “Thy wounds.../...like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,/To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue.”
And finally, one from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim that seems appropriate here: “Tormenting itself in its invincible ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of a cage.”
An original simile can make prose sing. Take these, for example, from Kingsley Amis:
“Kitty got up and behaved for a few seconds like somebody about to be machine-gunned from the air.”
“The ice compartment of the refrigerator looked like a small sample of a glacier.”
“This morning he looked more than ever like Genghis Khan meditating a purge of his captains.”
Trump is a long way from the prose style of Kingsley Amis.
Come November 3, let’s hope that Trump just goes away.
