Weird Languages

Dude, what are you even talking about?

Here we are, out standing in our field. | Photo by Art Trucker

Dear Readers,

One of the reasons most journalists hate Donald Trump is because we make our living using words and then he came along also making his living—and his fame and fortune—using words, but not in the way that seems legitimate for a political leader. He rejects our language: he’s invented a way of speaking that is all his own. It might as well be branded with his name: he speaks Trump. Here’s an example the New York Times used the other day. He was asked by Dr. Phil to give his opinion of Kamala Harris:

She’s a Marxist. Well, I can see, by action, she’s a person that wanted to defund the police very strongly, bailed out a lot of people in Minnesota from jails who did some really bad things. I saw that very loud and clear then, when that took place, a lot of bad things. She’s done a lot of bad things. There will be no fracking. There’ll be no drilling. She doesn’t want to drill, which will mean our country is going to shrivel up and die. You can’t run the country without fossil fuel, at least not for quite a while because you don’t have the power. They don’t have the power. You have all sorts of nice contraptions, but they don’t have — wind is fine, but it kills the birds. It destroys the fields. Destroys the fields, what it does.

You can get angry at the incoherence of it, the lack of intelligent thought, the flight from factuality, the childish vocabulary (“she’s done a lot of bad things”). It makes a lot of people want to spit with fury. But people in the Trump cult are hooked on this. It’s so much more entertaining than standard politician-speak. They’re hearing meaning in those words, as if they understand a language that most of us don’t.

Trump has many acolytes—most recently JD Vance—but I don’t think any of them will ever be able to speak Trump. Vance is trying, but what he’s got is the nastiness, combined with a lingering assumption from his pre-Trump days that leaders are supposed to make coherent arguments; the result is not entertaining. The language of Trump is organized around “nobody has ever seen anyone as great as Trump.” But when Vance mimics that, he only sounds like Trump’s stooge. And he can’t alter the grammar to “nobody has ever seen anyone as great as Vance.” He can’t invent something new. His language is that of a far-right pol in training, with echoes of George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis. . .

Vance attended an event on Saturday hosted by a crackpot preacher from Texas named Lance Wallnau. You may have seen a video clip of Wallnau discussing the rise of Kamala Harris after the Democratic National Convention. He speaks in a different language, too—not one he invented but one that is used in the subculture of “Christian dominionism,” a “theology” that preaches “that God has tasked Christians with taking dominion over society.”

What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel . . . It’s like Pentecostal 101. When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation, and domination, especially when it’s in a female role, trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for Truth, you’re dealing with a Jezebel spirit. . . . She can look presidential. That’s the seduction—what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the Truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her. . . . Jezebel may be the spirit you’re up against but then Trump has like an Elijah mantle on him, probably from the intercession of a million Christians. We gotta lean into this thing because the Elijah mantle can break the spell of witchcraft off America.

Interesting. But if Trump were to throw off his Elijah mantle before being whisked off in his chariot to the Great Golf Course in the Sky, it seems unlikely that Vance could pick it up. For one thing, Vance converted to Catholicism some time ago. That means he’s a follower of the man Wallnau has called “this fake apostle of Rome,” a.k.a., Pope Francis. The Christian nationalists really hate the pope. Vance has been only mildly critical of Francis in his public statements but it’s clear he’s more a servant of Trump than of his church’s spiritual leaders. His recent false claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio brought a rebuke from Ohio’s Catholic bishops.

Even among those of us who more or less share the same political language, there are dialects. Here’s an example: Not long ago I was talking politics with a very good friend, who happens to be more aligned with the Democratic Party than I am. She asked how I was feeling about the Harris-Walz ticket. I said I had a little more faith in the political instincts of Walz than of Harris. Why is that? Because, um, I think Walz is more of a populist and Harris is essentially a corporatist.

Readers, she laughed in my face. She gave me an uncomprehending look: What does that even mean?

There was no time for a 6,000-word answer. And I’m not good at jumping up on a soapbox and hitting a few quick talking points. Conversation always flits from one thing to another. The moment was lost.

However, I do have a 6,000-word answer. It is published in the new issue of The Baffler. Some Dots & Arrows readers may recall that I traveled to Texas in May. I spent a couple of days in the rootin’ tootin’ town of Lampasas and then in Austin. The subject here is Texas politics, not specifically Harris-Walz, but I think it clarifies what it means, in my dialect, to speak of populists vs. corporatists.

In this visit, I got to spend time with Old-School Populist Jim Hightower. He was a rising star when I worked at the Texas Observer in the late 1980s. But he lost a race for reelection as Agriculture Commissioner in 1990 to Rick Perry, who went on to become governor of Texas after George W. Bush left town. (Hightower later was fond of saying Perry is the one “who put the goober in gubernatorial.”) He writes a very good and relentlessly can-do newsletter on Substack, which is worth following. At 81, he remains one of our great democracy-loving American citizens. At one point, he told me that he has a “higher than normal—maybe higher than sane—level of optimism.” I almost didn’t include that in the story; he said that when Biden was still in the race and was heading for electoral disaster. But by the time my story came out, Harris had emerged stronger than most of us would have expected—and then she selected Walz for vice-president. Hightower’s optimism was vindicated, at least for the moment. As he wrote in August:

In 2006, I went Walzing across southern Minnesota in support of a “nobody” named Tim Walz. At the time, he was running an upstart, underdog congressional campaign as a plain-spoken progressive populist in what was then considered a solid-red rural district. He didn’t have a chance against the lobbyist-funded, Bush-backed GOP incumbent. Except… Tim won! He did it the new “old-fashioned” way: By being himself, appealing directly to working class families, unabashedly confronting corporate power, and rallying volunteers in a door-to-door grassroots campaign.

Anyway, if you have time to read this Texas populism story, you will see pretty much where I’m calling from, politically, these days.

This recent journalistic foray of mine is likely to reach a fraction of the readers that I found with my story last fall that went semi-viral. (You know the one I’m talking about.) Aging white guys writing about politics are in no short supply—it’s not easy to be outstanding in this field.

The cookie story still hasn’t died. I heard just the other day from a guy who wrote: “I grew up in Madison and went to the UW in the early ’80s, walking around in punk regalia and majoring in Philosophy and Environmental Studies... those cookies were a whole meal for me in those impoverished days.  I am trying to find or reverse engineer the cookie recipe.”

I was pleased to refer him to the latest news on the Guerrilla Cookie beat. Though this newsletter previously reported, in a world-exclusive scoop, that the cookie will make its return, the fuller story is in the new issue of On Wisconsin magazine here, in a fine article by a fine writer that everyone should read.

A thank-you note. Heartfelt gratitude to all who checked in and who wrote notes in response to last month’s newsletter reflecting on our recent death in the family. It meant a lot to Alice, and to the rest of us, that so many people spoke up in sympathy.

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