A brief language critique of Trump’s language critique (Michael Wolff)

No question: it takes god-like power to literally trigger an earthquake with a speech act, as Trump claims to have done with the words “You’re fired!” Jesus of Nazareth needed a loud cry and death on the cross to do this (Mt 27, 50-51).

But a powerful, quasi-divine speech act is something different from the language used for it—and Trump’s relationship with language is complicated. The power of language is often both attributed and denied to him. This is what Michael Wolff does at the end of his third Trump book, entitled Landslide, when he writes: “Trump has never needed an organization, or infrastructure, or even a plan to make things happen. It happens because of his own stream of consciousness—his own expressiveness makes things happen. He talks. [...] Talks endlessly. [...] Th[at] fact [...] might only reasonably be explained by his absolute belief that his voice alone has reality-altering powers.”²⁵

You have to realize what Wolff is writing here. Words such as ‘speak’, ‘say’ or even just ‘words’ do not appear at all in these sentences; Wolff flatly denies Trump ‘structure’ and ‘plan’. What Wolff attests to Trump is a public “stream of consciousness”, which is of course by definition unstructured and uncontrolled. In addition, Wolff uses the already somewhat derogatory word “talk”, which immediately afterwards, when repeated as “[endless] talk”, is clearly recognizable as similarly pejorative as—here—the word “expressiveness”. In the end, it is not Trump’s language that has “reality-altering powers” (and this may sound mildly ironic here, but is actually nothing more than the textbook definition of a ‘performative speech act’²⁶), but—only—“his voice”: and, with that, all conceptual elements, however rudimentary, are now excluded, “his voice alone”. However, this is not even Wolff’s own explanation of the Trump phenomenon; it is expressly Trump’s own “absolute belief” that, according to Wolff, could at best provide a meaningful explanation (“reasonabl[e] [...] expla[nation]”) in the irrealis (“might only”).

Wolff’s sentences quoted here are a miniature masterpiece of malice towards Trump. At the same time, however, they prove him absolutely right. Trump does indeed have “reality-altering powers” that border on the unimaginable. Where he is right, he is right. However, the question remains open as to how much of this power issues from Trump’s language.

The mode in which Trump speaks is that of the apodictic.²⁷ His statements are supposed to be indisputably true. The index finger repeatedly raised towards Ukrainian President Zelensky fits in with this: The outstretched index finger is the gesture of a prophet who has God, justice and truth on his side. John the Baptist preached with an outstretched index finger, depicted on the crucifixion plaque on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece; Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama have done the same.

A look at the etymology of the index finger, Latin ‘index’, shows how deeply rooted this gesture is culturally. The underlying verb ‘indicāre’ ‘to indicate, discover, make known’²⁸ is related, like the German words ‘zeigen’ and ‘zeihen’, to the ancient Greek ‘δείκνυμι’ [deíknymi] ‘to show’.²⁹ The word ‘δείκνυμι’ in turn is related to the ancient Greek ‘δίκη’ [díkē] ‘right’ and the Latin ‘dīcere’ ‘to say’. Etymologically, the ‘jūdex’ is the one ‘who assigns the right [iūs]’ or ‘speaks the right’.³⁰ Whoever speaks ‘apodictically’ in the sense of ancient Greek ‘ἀποδείκνυμι’³¹ [apodeíknymi], as Liddell & Scott define it in their Greek-English Lexicon, “point[s] away from other objects at one, and so [...] point[s] out, display[s], make[s] known, whether by deed or word”.³² This in turn is an act of referring that establishes a reference.³³

It is obvious that those who speak apodictically are not necessarily telling the truth, stating facts or being right. At the same time, however, anyone who speaks apodictically claims to tell the truth or to be honest (Trump: “I’ll be honest”), to state facts and to be right. He or she therefore presupposes the terms ‘truth’, ‘fact’ and ‘right’, even if he or she speaks ‘alternative facts’, ‘fake news’, ‘perceived truths’³⁴ or spreads lies or speaks ironically—but not in the case of bullshit, because here the truth value is irrelevant.³⁵ Once again: anyone who spreads ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’, lies or speaks ironically necessarily recognizes the existence of truth and facts.

So much for a little language critique of Trump’s language critique.

Notes

1. ²⁵Wolff, Landslide, p. 298.
2. ²⁶“[A] performative utterance, or, for short, ‘a performative’ [...] indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action [...]. With performative utterances are contrasted [...] ‘constative’ utterances: to issue a constative utterance (i.e. to utter it with a historical reference) is to make a statement. To issue a performative utterance is, for example, to make a bet.” John L. Austin: How To Do Things With Words, Oxford 1962, p. 6.
3. ²⁷Or even “suicidally apodictic”; John Burt: The Lesson of Lincoln in the Age of Trump, in: Angel Jaramillo Torres, Marc Benjamin Sable (eds.): Trump and Political Philosophy. Leadership, Statesmanship, and Tyranny, Cham 2018, pp. 211-233, p. 225f.
4. ²⁸Cf. the Digital Dictionary of the German Language, www.dwds.de/wb/Index
   (6/6/2025).
5. ²⁹See “δείκνυμι”, in: Greek-German School Dictionary. Edited by Gustav Eduard Benseler, Adolf Kaegi et al., 16th reprint of the 15th edition of 1931, Leipzig 2004, p. 162f.
6. ³⁰“dīco”, in: Alois Walde: Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Heidelberg 2/1910, p. 231f.
7. ³¹See “ἀποδείκνυμι”, in: Greek-German School Dictionary, p. 88.
8. ³²“ἀποδείκνυμι”, in: Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott-Jones), www.perseus.tufts.edu, Greek Word Study Tool (6/6/2025).
9. ³³ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/ (6/6/2025).
10. ³⁴“Research finds that one problematic consequence of being repeatedly exposed to fake news is that, over time, people find it less unethical to share misinformation because it starts to feel true. This subjective feeling of something being true, without having any objective proof to substantiate it, is what The Late Show host and comedian Stephen Colbert jokingly referred to as ‘truthiness’. When defining the term, he said: ‘I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books, constantly telling us what is or isn’t true! Instead, he challenged the viewer to ‘try looking it up in your gut, this is truthiness: truth that comes from the gut, not books’.” Sander van der Linden: Foolproof. Why we fall for misinformation and how to build immunity, London 2023, p. 23.
11. ³⁵“It is [...] th[e] lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” Harry Frankfurt: On Bullshit, Princeton 2005, p. 33f.—See also Philipp Hübl: Bullshit-Resistenz, Berlin 2018.