From Metapragmatic Gaslighting to Linguistic State of Exception: Donald Trump and the Language Reform of the New Right

Since his rise to the political stage in 2015, Donald Trump has emphasized the urgency of a linguistic reform: To “make America great again” is imperative to abolish periphrastic circumlocutions and embrace a firm stance against the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Yet this call for semantic transparency and performative effectiveness has been paralleled by the frequent deployment of indirectness and sophisticated forms of discursive manipulation, which I call metapragmatic gaslighting. Drawing on a corpus of statements, interventions, and interviews by President Trump, this article examines the basic principles of the language reform of the New Right and describes how metapragmatic gaslighting preludes to establishing a linguistic state of exception. Characterized by the suspension of shared norms for the use and interpretation of utterances, this emerging regime of pragmatic unaccountability materializes an ultrareactionary and hypercapitalist linguistic order.