Statue of Thucydides, Vienna (photographed 2010) | Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock
On January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the US Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. By any reasonable definition, this armed uprising was an insurrection. Yet President Trump recently described it as “a day of love.”
In striking contrast, Trump called a mostly peaceful recent protest against ICE raids in Los Angeles last week an “insurrection”—and sought to suppress it with the National Guard and the Marines.
It is tempting to dismiss Trump’s language as mere rhetoric. But it may signal something deeper: a breakdown in the shared meaning of language, which can threaten the very foundations of a civil society.
The ancient Greek historian Thucydides was one of the first to realize the relationship between social disintegration and distorted language.
Writing about the Peloponnesian War, he recounts the civil strife that engulfed the city-state of Corcyra. What began as a policy disagreement between democrats and oligarchs devolved into a massacre: Sacred norms were abandoned, temples desecrated, and families torn apart by violence and suspicion.
As public order unravelled, so too did language. “To fit in with the change of events,” Thucydides writes, “words had to change their usual meanings.” Prudence and moderation became cowardice, fanaticism became courage, and seeking compromise became betrayal. Anyone who tried to understand both sides “was totally unfitted for action,” and “fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man.” In short, language—rather than generating consensus—had become a divisive factional weapon.
Thucydides’s account remains unsettling because it exposes a perennial danger: The breakdown of language can trigger the breakdown of society itself. Words that once helped establish common reference points instead became factional rallying cries. Rather than building understanding, such speech instead accelerates conflict
That breakdown plays out in multiple ways. As words lose meaning, promises lose their force. Without the ability to make and trust promises, human action becomes less predictable and society loses control over its future. Public deliberation falls apart, not just because we disagree, but because we no longer have agreement on the language of disagreement. Collective identity disintegrates. Without a common vocabulary to describe who “we” are and what values bind us, the state risks balkanizing into a single territory cohabitated by rival factions with irreconcilable interests and values.
This is the deeper damage done by Trump’s political rhetoric.
He doesn’t merely misuse words. Trump is the most prominent public figure in the country, if not the world, and his misuse of language scrambles the moral and conceptual categories that many rely on to interpret political life.
He mocks prisoners of war and calls fallen soldiers “suckers.” He pays for a porn star’s silence about an extramarital affair, but is hailed as a champion of Christian values. He demands law and order while embracing rioters, seditionists, and anti-US paramilitary organizations. He calls protests against an immigration policy “insurrection” (a policy he partly rescinded shortly thereafter), even as he describes an actual attempt to overthrow American democracy as an act of “love.”
A promiscuous misuse of language potentially corrodes the evaluative architecture of society itself. Language becomes a performative act of partisan loyalty: What matters is its use in signalling one’s allegiance to a side.
In Trump’s usage, a word like insurrection no longer identifies an organized attempt to overthrow the government by violence—it simply identifies something that displeases him. Its negative moral connotation drives his use of it, not its actual definition. Words become tools not for describing reality, but for punishing enemies and rewarding friends.
The result is semantic confusion: connotation overtakes denotation. Meaning withers. In a polarized political environment where words have lost their meaning, the same word can seem both sensible and absurd, depending on who is speaking. What it actually refers to is beside the point.
In this, Trump is not only a cause of social disintegration, he is also a symptom. The breakdown of linguistic norms did not begin with him, nor is he its only driver today. But his prominence and theatrical disregard for meaning accelerate that decay. Even when he speaks emotionally charged nonsense, his followers affirm its wisdom. As Thucydides puts it, “anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted.”
George Orwell understood this danger well. In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” he warned that political speech often aims not to clarify, but to conceal—“to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” But Orwell’s deeper insight was that the distortion of language runs in both directions. “If thought corrupts language,” he wrote, “language can also corrupt thought.”
For a modern democracy, sloppy language is not just an omen of decay; it is also its agent. When language becomes vague, ornamental, or unmoored from reality, it makes critical judgment harder and public manipulation easier. A citizen cannot hold power to account if they cannot name, or even make sense of, what they see.
That is the real danger of Trump’s speech. When public figures twist the meaning of our political language—words like “insurrection”—they do more than lie. They hobble our ability to think and judge. They make our ideals unintelligible. And when that happens, the very conditions of common political life begin to vanish.
