Opinion Not to be braggadocious, but here’s another Trumpism

US President Donald Trump’s address to the UN General Assembly was delivered with the air of a man both aware of his global audience and uninterested in it. He spoke, as he often does, not so much to the room as at it: “…I’m really good at predicting things, you know? … And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything,” he declared, as he accused the UN of “empty words”, dismissed climate change, and chided European generosity toward asylum seekers. It was a soliloquy of self-regard primed for MAGA applause.

It is no secret that where world leaders prefer to lean into diplomatic opacity, the most powerful leader in the world prefers unfiltered fireworks: “I know words. I have the best words,” he had declared at a rally in 2015 in the run-up to his first term. Braggadocious, however, isn’t a Trump coinage, though it certainly sounds like a neologism that might have come out of a Mar-a-Lago branding exercise. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word first swaggered into existence in the late 16th century, appearing in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, in the form of a self-important character named Braggadocio. Over time, like Grinch and Scrooge, the name morphed into an adjective, used to describe the vainglorious for their particular affinity for bluster and self-aggrandisement.

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The word now joins a crowded cabinet of Trumpisms: “Bigly”, that odd lexical cousin no one quite remembers inviting, and which the Oxford English Dictionary says is an obscure adverbial equivalent of braggadocious. Then there’s “unpresidented”, which briefly turned a typo into a political metaphor; and of course, “covfefe”, a tweet-shaped riddle. In Trump’s rhetorical universe, speech is performative cosplay. But if clarity isn’t the goal, bafflement may well be the strategy. As one of his predecessors, Harry S Truman, once said: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”