In Other News · United States · Politics

Source: Axios

President Trump has long nicknamed his opponents, and now, as November approaches, he's even trying to dictate the vocabulary around key issues. The big picture: Trump's latest effort to reshape political language follows his longtime political strategy: Define the terms of the debate, and you gain power over the debate itself.But as polling on those issues continues to haunt the president's party, Trump's new vocabulary may not be enough to change voters' minds.Case in point: Americans are worried about AI — but to Trump, that word no longer exists. It's "super intelligence" now.Voters are also concerned about affordability, but that's a "new word" and a "hoax," Trump says.And the war in Iran? Sometimes Trump says it's a war — a word that carries strict legal implications — and other times it's an "excursion," a "military operation" or a "skirmish."The intrigue: The issues are starkly different, but the throughline is the way Trump frames the linguistic building blocks of political debate."If you can actually get everyone who influences our perception of language to adopt your language, you have a very powerful capacity," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director emerita of the Annenberg Public...