‘Trump and Hegseth’s vivid wallowings in industrial ultraviolence are in reality no more honest than regular political dissembling.’ Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersView image in fullscreen‘Trump and Hegseth’s vivid wallowings in industrial ultraviolence are in reality no more honest than regular political dissembling.’ Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersAnalysisForget euphemism, Trump is using unabashed viciousness in his language against IranSteven PooleThe Trump administration takes pleasure in deploying dysphemism to describe the killing of Iranians
On 23 March, Donald Trump said that if things didn’t go to his liking in Iran, “we just keep bombing our little hearts out”. A week later the US president told journalists on Air Force One: “You never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.”
On 4 March, Pete Hegseth squirmed in pleasure as he described “death and destruction from the sky all day long”. Whatever happened to the subtle art of political euphemism?
The UK had a secretary at war long before it ever had a minister of defence, and the US did not rename its department of war to “defense” until after the second world war. People sniggered when Trump and Hegseth announced that “department of war” would be its new name, but that might be charitably taken as a macho refusal to mince words. The many overseas adventures of the US military since 1945, after all, have not all been exclusively defensive.
1:05Trump says he wants a 'Department of War' not a 'Department of Defense' – videoOfficial names for military actions are usually mealy-mouthed: the US invasion of Panama in 1989 was called Operation Just Cause, while the last Gulf war, as everyone remembers fondly, was Operation Iraqi Freedom. The name for the current war, Operation Epic Fury, certainly sounds more like a teenage boy’s idea of comic-book armageddon.
But even the word “operation” is a euphemism – these are not exercises in healthcare – and even Trump still won’t call his war a war, since that would raise uncomfortable questions about the consent of Congress. So it is instead, according to Trump, an “excursion”, or “our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran”. Vladimir Putin, who calls his four-year war on Ukraine a “special military operation”, would approve.
The opposite of a euphemism is a dysphemism: a name for something that makes it sound maximally horrible. Politicians normally use dysphemisms for their opponents: people might be labelled “terrorists” or “fascists”, already engaged in “genocide” or threatening to nuke London within 15 minutes.
The Trump administration, however, revels in the use of dysphemism for its own actions. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight,” Hegseth said on 4 March. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
Read moreThe following week, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags [ie, Iranians] today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!” The crudity, here, is the point. Sociolinguists say that the use of dysphemism violates social norms and taboos, and Trump is nothing if not the taboo-buster-in-chief.
Do I endorse war crimes, by threatening to bomb Iran’s desalination plants? Very well then, I endorse war crimes. Who cares? Hegseth, meanwhile, announced a policy of giving “no quarter” to the enemy, ie refusing to take prisoners, which is itself another war crime. The “secretary of war”, especially, is addicted to virtue signalling, as long as the virtue being signalled is martial.
His favourite term is “lethality”; he loves telling the armed forces how “lethal” they are. “We are not defenders any more,” he announced gleefully. “We are warriors: trained to kill the enemy and break their will.” (It might seem excessive to break their will after killing them, but why settle for half measures?) He seemed to experience a sadistic pleasure in announcing the sinking of an Iranian warship by a US torpedo, enjoying the idea of the doomed crew’s “quiet death”.
This sort of unabashed viciousness is part of the appeal of the Maga administration for its fans, and might seem like a refreshing return to plain speaking. But you can, of course, speak plainly while lying. (“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” claimed George Orwell. Well, who is more insincere than Trump?) And Trump and Hegseth’s vivid wallowings in industrial ultraviolence are in reality no more honest than regular political dissembling.
After all, if your focus is on destruction as a virtue in itself, does it really matter what you blow up and who you kill? The goal, as Hegseth described it, is to “unleash” American “lethality”, not to “shackle” it, as though the US armed forces are a dangerous dog that deserves to roam free across the globe, pursuing its own savage instincts wherever it turns.
But while this maniacal, no-bullshit posturing, this chest-beating fiesta of blood and guts, takes centre stage, the real bullshit – of geopolitical miscalculation and cynical profiteering – seems to be simply swept under the carpet.
The Financial Times reports that a broker acting for Hegseth sought to invest in US military companies before the war. Trump told the same paper: “My favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran.”.
The current landing page of the White House’s website, by contrast, celebrates Trump’s accomplishments so far in terms of the finest obfuscation: “Abroad, a doctrine of peace through strength has secured alliances, ended eight wars, and positioned America as an indispensable force for global stability.” Peace through strength, is it? As the party in Nineteen Eighty-Four insisted: “War is peace”.
What do Trump and Hegseth really want? One answer is: to enrich Trump and Hegseth. But if their real aim all along was simply to troll the shade of Orwell, they are doing an absolutely lethal job.
