You can call a slimehead by the better-known name of orange roughy, but it’s still an ugly fish. The same goes for President Donald Trump’s attempt to euphemize a first year in office that was historic for all the wrong reasons.
A regime that gave the world “alternative facts” has been working overtime at year’s end to banish words it doesn’t like or believe in, and to take credit for, or reframe, good things that it had very little to do with.
Our 71-year-old president is a slow learner and creature of bad habits. But he does seem to understand the authoritarian axiom that repetitive political language can make “lies sound truthful,” as George Orwell wrote in the definitive essay on the subject.
Thus, “climate change” is forbidden for the American public servants working to protect the natural world from a changing climate. Law enforcement, under the special counsel Robert Mueller, is now “a coup,” in the favored word of state-run television, Fox News. And a “so-called judge” is the president’s term for a real federal authority with years of courtroom experience, not the monumentally ill-qualified people he’s been stuffing into said positions.
But guess who’s going to prevail when the White House word police go up against the real police?