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.
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.”
