Words Matter ...

... And These Words Really Matter!

This piece has significant and important input from my friend and former Foreign Service colleague Alexis Ludwig.

More than most politicians, our current president has long enjoyed special dispensation to say whatever pops into his head no matter how alarming it sounds or how little sense it makes. From bragging in public that he could “shoot someone in downtown Manhattan” in broad daylight and be rewarded for it to falsely claiming immigrants were eating dogs and cats in small-town Ohio, it didn’t matter. People love it. It’s all in good fun, he doesn’t really mean anything by it, and his supporters tell the rest of us that we should take him seriously but not literally. Whatever that means.

Even based on the loosey-goosey standard of politicians who “spin” for a living, the man is allowed to say things with no basis in truth and be no worse for the wear.

Far from hurting him, this special gift has given him what some commentators call a curious “authenticity.” To paraphrase comedian Dave Chappelle, he is that most paradoxical thing: an honest liar, a man who is almost always truthful and transparent about the fact that he is lying. The special mishmash of fact posing as fiction and fiction posing as fact in the random oblique wanderings of his public presentations has even been given a name: The Weave. In this fluid absence of structure, words flow forth without obvious connection either to each other or to reality, the subject itself shifts direction unannounced, mad-lib riffs follow brief anchor moments of reading stiffly from the tele-prompter, and so on in a perverse cycle or kaleidoscope or avalanche of raw verbiage that has somehow managed to remain entertaining and compelling to a critical mass of the American people. Armies of words marching across a page in search of meaning? Yes. The middle school kid giving an oral report in spite of the fact that he hasn’t read the book, or any books? Yup.

Lately, however, this tendency of disordered speech has grown more pronounced. Two diverging dynamics within it have emerged with greater clarity. Both trends were on painful display in three recent public presentations--the Charlie Kirk memorial (”He (Charlie) did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.”), the speech before the UN General Assembly (your countries are going to hell, climate change is a “scam”, energy policy is destroying your countries, I solved seven “unendable wars in seven months”) and perhaps most preoccupying of all, his preoccupying presentation before 800 military flag officers at Quantico, which I will discuss at greater length below.

The first is an ever-increasing, now almost total, disconnection of his words to external reality. They now seem to inhabit a realm of sheer invention, conjured by a mind whose purchase on the external world is visibly and audibly slipping. To say it is to believe it. If there is any such thing as “consensus reality”, he no longer lives in it, and his words make that plain as day to anyone paying attention.

The second trend is more worrying still, if that is possible. That is, those words which do correspond with a real world outside his own mind reflect a political vision at odds with democracy and the constitutional order. Concretely, that the principal threat facing this country comes from “the enemies from within”; which is to say some unidentified and nefarious subset of us, the American people. This untethered vision, even though plainly false, could have extremely dangerous practical consequences in reality. US military forces, led by the 800 top brass in that room in Quantico, might be turned against the very same American people they are constitutionally bound to protect. If that doesn’t worry you, it should, and I’ll venture, will worry you for concrete reasons soon.

Now on to the speech at Quantico.

In order to appreciate it in its full glory, you need to listen to all 72 minutes of it. Otherwise you’ll think I’m making things up. You might want to have a glass or three of wine before you do. As you’ll hear, the speech was a mix of the usual self-aggrandizing campaign blather (yes, he talked about deserving the Nobel Peace Prize) and two other more shocking elements: untethered, surreal walkabouts (how presidents walk down steps, the beauty of Trump’s signature, what awful people “the radical left Democrats” are) and direct threats to use the military against the American people. The reaction—or disciplined non-reaction—of the poker-faced audience spoke volumes.

Words matter, and the words of the President of the United States, especially in a formal setting with media present, matter a lot. Some examples:

In 1858, two years before his own election as President touched off secession, then war, Lincoln said: “A house divided against itself, cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” And thank goodness it became “all the other”, due in no small part to Lincoln’s words and actions.

In FDR’s 1933 inaugural speech, four years into the Great Depression, he said: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself.” In other words, we can get through this if we tackle it head on, and overcome our doubts and fears. And, under FDR’s firm leadership, we did.

In 1963 John F. Kennedy went to West Berlin and famously said, “Ich bin ein Berliner”. It was a message of hope and support for West Berliners two years after the Wall went up. We stand with you because we are you. We’re in this thing for the long haul. We will prevail together. We did; we were; and we did.

In 1987 Ronald Reagan upped the ante. He also spoke in West Berlin and told the new Soviet leader, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The citizens of both Berlins did it for him, two years later.

So cut to Donald Trump at Quantico in 2025, speaking before 800 generals, admirals, and senior non-commissioned officers, practically our entire senior military leadership. It was a historic, unprecedented setting. The stage was set for something new, something big, an announcement, a plan, a vision. Did he talk about his plans to bring peace to Ukraine or Gaza? About the peer-nation competition and threat from China? About the game-changing drone warfare in Ukraine and how the battlespace is changing before our eyes? About how we are bringing AI advances to bear in our military planning, and need to recruit the talent that is up to that challenge? About his declaration of war against Tren de Aragua and his new policy of blowing up suspected drug boats on the high seas?

No, but he compared Portland, Oregon to a “war zone” and suggested that the military should use American cities as “training grounds”. He said that those present would need to “handle” the “enemy from within … before it gets out of control.” The enemy from within, of course, being us, the American people. Hence the appropriately stony faces and perfect absence of applause from the flag officers.

The question becomes: Should we believe President Trump when he says he’s going to use the military to fight the “enemy from within”? Indeed we should. While Trump lies about most everything - “I won the 2020 election...the inauguration crowd size was the largest in history...I barely knew Jeffrey Epstein...I don’t know anything about Project 2025” - he is often very direct about his intentions. He told us that if he lost in 2020 he wouldn’t have to respect the results because he could only lose by fraud; he did the same thing in 2016 and 2024, only didn’t need to follow up on his promise. Why? Because those years, the only acceptable and allowable (to him) result—a credible election victory—saved him the trouble

So the President’s words matter. They send a message. They prepare the environment, and shape it. In a worst case scenario, they may even create the very reality that, until now, had remained entirely fictional. Trump’s words about using the military to fight domestic “enemies” is consequential and chilling, and the message couldn’t be clearer. In case you hadn’t already figured it out after watching masked men snatch innocent people off the streets and national guards sent to big cities (run by Democrats) in response to invented emergencies, you’ll see it before long: “we’re coming for you”.

But what message do you think the President was sending–or the officers receiving—when he said this at Quantico:

(Referring to President Biden) “Every day the guy’s falling down stairs … I’m very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs — like I’m on stairs, like these stairs — I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record, just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy...Be cool when you walk down. But don’t bop down the stairs...(President Obama would) bop down those stairs … he’d go down the stairs … bop, bop, bop … wouldn’t hold on.” General, taking notes: “Good. Got it. I’ll make sure I brief the troops when I get back to base. The message is, uh, stairs? Hmm, maybe he means steps … step by step. Got it.”

Or this, apparently riffing about signing flag officer commissions:

“How would you like to have your thing signed by an Autopen? You know, when I have a general and I have to sign for a general because we have beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper, I said throw a little more gold on it, they deserve it. Give me, I want the A paper, not the D paper. We used to sign a piece of garbage, I said this man’s going to be a general, right?...Yeah. I don’t want to use this. I want to use the big, beautiful firm paper. I want to use the real gold writing when you talk about the position. And they’re beautiful and — but how would you like to have that where you — some kid sitting in the back office is having it signed with an autopen? I thought about it and I thought about you people first, admirals, generals...And I sign it — actually, I love my signature, I really do. Everyone loves my signature....” General, taking notes: “Got it. My wing commanders are going to be relieved to hear this, and our PRC pals are going to shit bricks. I’ll bet their commissions are printed on crappy paper. We’re number one!”

To recap in the event it hasn’t quite sunk in, the President of the United States addressed our 800 most senior military leaders and talked about his signature, the proper way to descend the stairs, and his fixation about winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He occasionally mentioned national security when he was reading from the teleprompter, but as one pundit commented, “(Trump) offered no strategy, no operational guidance, and no plan to address real threats.”

At best, he didn’t read the room and treated it as another campaign event. At worst, the rambling, self-centered, dangerous (he’s the president after all) nonsense reflects steep cognitive decline, on a par with or exceeding that of his distinguished predecessor, and we’re only nine months into a four year term. We just witnessed the mental disintegration of one President right before our eyes, and we’ve learned that his close advisors were aware of what was happening. Are we now witnessing another? Who are the folks who are not telling us now and will pretend they did in the not too distant future?

As for those 800 plus generals and admirals and non-commissioned leaders? What do you imagine was going through their heads? What is going through yours? You can bet that when they returned to their commands, they tasked their lawyers - those JAGS and others who hadn’t yet been fired by Pete Hegseth - to brush up on a commander’s obligation to obey a legal order. And by the way, in this day and age: what constitutes a legal order? We may be about to find out.