When Donald Trump, roughly two weeks before his second presidential inauguration, announced that he intended to rename the Gulf of Mexico, it seemed like a punchline to an odd joke. “We’ll be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring,” the Republican said, adding that he believes such a move would be “appropriate” because the body of water is “ours.”
After the president was sworn in — he included a “Gulf of America” reference in his inaugural remarks — his administration started leaning into the bizarre rhetorical campaign, forcing agencies to use the Trump-approved phrase.
But it now appears the broader effort is extending beyond just governmental departments. NBC News reported:
The Associated Press said the White House violated the First Amendment today when it barred an AP reporter from entering an executive order signing. The AP said the White House restricted the reporter’s access after the news organization did not update its editorial standards renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
In other words, one of the nation’s largest news organizations was told that it was effectively being punished for calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico. If The Associated Press’ concerns are correct, the White House had some kind of trade in mind: If the AP wants access, it should use the phrase the president likes.
“It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment,” the AP’s executive editor, Julie Pace, said in a statement.
That’s true, though it’s apparently an exciting new era for the First Amendment, in which people and businesses are free to use the words and phrases that Republicans have endorsed.
The controversy surrounding The Associated Press is important in its own right, but there’s also larger concern about the White House and its interest in language. As The New York Times summarized:
Of all the changes underway in Washington, one of the deepest has to do with the very language that is spoken here. In order to remake the government, President Trump and his administration are remaking the language used to describe the government. An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by the president and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak.
We’re no longer just talking about a twisted form of conservative political correctness, with Republicans calling the estate tax the “death tax,” while labeling big corporations “job creators.” Those phrases are part of a partisan game that’s silly, but largely inconsequential.
As the debacle surrounding the White House and the AP helps demonstrate, however, we’re approaching a qualitatively different kind of rhetorical dynamic.
“Across government, a war is being waged in wordplay,” the Times’ report added. “It is fought in executive orders, official statements from the White House, press briefings and all manner of communiqués, internal and external. The very language that Mr. Trump and his administration are using to smash the federal bureaucracy is now also the official language of that bureaucracy, because it is being dictated by the man doing the smashing.”
If all of this sounds rather Orwellian, that’s because it is.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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