Before anything else, I should point out that my research over the past decade or so has focused primarily on the language and narratives of far-right populist movements. That covers a lot of territory, but I generally have not looked closely at, for instance, the language of authoritarian states specifically. The reason is not because there is always a clear line between the two, but because there are only so many hours in the day, and sometimes you just have to set limits.

There clearly is a lot of overlap between the two, and the current Trump administration and its Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement make that abundantly clear. Trump’s persona going back at least to the 1980s has been that of a man who wants to do nothing more than project a cartoonish image of wealth and splendor. One of his superpowers is that he has been able to maintain that image at the same time that he has built up his current self-projection as an enemy of elites. Now he is both extremely wealthy and literally the president of the United States. The populist rhetoric continues, and the absurdity just accumulates.

The upshot is that, even when a populist movement takes state power, it doesn’t have to stop attacking purported “elites,” although it may have to find new people to fill that role in the eyes of the faithful. As I said, state language is not really my field of expertise, but I believe that looking at the emerging official verbiage of the US government in terms of reactionary populist language may be useful here, even if I do not have a wide range of references to state actors to draw on.

Trumpy Language Before the White House

Another of Trump’s widely acknowledged superpowers has long been his ability to win free publicity by injecting himself into debates that previously had nothing to do with him. In two of the most notorious cases (pre-2016, at least), he positioned himself not as an adversary of elites per se but of prominent Black men: the Central Park Five and Barack Obama.

In May 1989, there was no discernible reason for Trump to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times and three other major New York papers implying that he wanted the Central Park Five to be executed – a position that few (if any) public figures had openly taken in response to charges that did not include homicide. He was a Manhattan real estate “developer,” and the people he wanted to woo for purposes of his day job were not the klansmen his father used to cavort with but rather the well-heeled investors who worked in the Financial District or Midtown by day and haunted in the Upper East Side or suburban mansions in Greenwich, Connecticut, by night. Many of those people may be racist, but decorum usually holds them back from literally publishing it.

Likewise Trump’s seemingly (at the time) inexplicable position as the number one gadfly of the “birther” conspiracy theory. When Obama released his long-form birth certificate in 2011, Trump hastily called a press conference to take credit for provoking that action and declare that “I am really honored and I am really proud that I was able to do something that nobody else could do.” Again, there was no apparent reason for Trump to do this at the time except perhaps to gratuitously assert his power over an even more powerful Black man.

But in both cases, Trump was able to force his most absurd ideas to be taken seriously; large text on the pages of the newspaper of record and action by the president of the United States have a way of granting nonsense an aura of legitimacy. And by 2016, Trump was saying – arguing! – not only that Obama was indeed born in the USA, but that the controversy around his birth certificate was ginned up by none other than Hilary Clinton. And again he was given lots of air time to say that because now it was coming from a viable major-party candidate for the US presidency, thus granting still more legitimacy to still more nonsense.

Redefining Terms from the Bully Pulpit

In 2025, Trump finds himself once again in the White House (the epitome of elite status) and defending himself against sustained, credible claims that he engaged in sexual misconduct with girls and young women trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. His position as head of state renders almost anything that comes out of his mouth potentially newsworthy, and so his seemingly boundless need for attention is fed constantly while a cadre of sycophants takes notes. Now the language that he has been using to defend himself is becoming official doctrine among his allies in government.

In July, Trump took to his personal, boutique social media outlet to complain about “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” even attacking his own supporters who have started taking the claims against Trump seriously. Along the way, he described prior claims against him as follows:

the FAKE and fully discredited Steele Dossier, the lying 51 “intelligence” Agents, the Laptop from Hell, which the Dems swore had come from Russia (No, it came from Hunter Biden’s bathroom!), and even the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam itself, a totally fake and made up story used in order to hide Crooked Hillary Clinton’s big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election, these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at

It’s not exactly news to point out that Trump often speaks in borderline gibberish, but it’s worth noting that his word choice is fairly predictable. In September, he again answered questions about Epstein, telling reporters in the Oval Office that “it’s really a Democrat hoax, because they’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president.” This is Trump just being Trump, and Trump clearly knows something about getting people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant. But what is noteworthy is how his vocabulary has found its way into official statements not from Trump himself but from his toadies with access to Congressional letterhead.

After Democrats on the House oversight committee released a stack of Epstein-related photos last week, including one of Trump with his arms around the waists of two young women while several other young women stand alongside them, Republicans on the same committee released a statement that included the following:

Democrats’ hoax against President Trump has been completely debunked. Nothing in the documents we’ve received shows any wrongdoing. Ranking Member Robert Garcia and Oversight Democrats should be ashamed of this disgusting behavior of putting politics above justice for the survivors.

It’s pretty clear at this point that, in MAGA world, the words “hoax,” “debunked,” “fake,” and “discredited” don’t actually mean what the rest of us think they do. Coming from their mouths, “debunked” and “discredited” amount to non-denial denials, which fall just shy of admissions of guilt, and adding “completely” makes it sound like they’re just screaming it. A “hoax” is any public statement that is adverse to their own interests generally and Trump’s personal interests above all.

Arguably the MAGA movement’s most consistent description of criticism of Trump as a “hoax” that has been “debunked” has been in response to the “very fine people” controversy. In case you’ve forgotten, during an August 15, 2017 press conference, Trump was asked about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a few days earlier. He notoriously answered a question by saying that “you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” However you may want to interpret that statement, the definition of “hoax” generally does not apply to claims that Trump was praising neo-nazis and white nationalists: he was talking about people who had attended a rally that was organized, promoted, and quite visibly attended by exactly those kinds of people (I can vouch; I was there). The worst that can be said about those of us who believe Trump was glad-handing fascists is that we may be overlooking a bit of hair-splitting nuance.

Similarly, saying that the claims of Trump’s critics have been “debunked” only shuts down further discussion while avoiding defending what Trump actually said and relying on the defense of some unnamed “debunker” of the past – all without ever saying that Trump didn’t say what he was accused of saying. That fits the definition of a “non-denial denial” pretty neatly.

Meanwhile, the Oversight Republicans’ claim that their Democratic colleagues should be “ashamed” and that their behavior is “disgusting” is roughly equivalent to saying that “this is sordid, so don’t look at it because it hurts us rather than them.” It is a way of attempting to stigmatize someone else without addressing the content of their actions – the kind of language that genteel public figures use to condemn sexual or gender minorities while trying to avoid naming them.

“Justice,” of course, means something totally counterintuitive under a leader who really believes that “l’état c’est moi.” Whatever measure of accountability used to exist in the US legal system prior to Trump 2.0 is now subject to the personal whims of a vindictive, perpetually aggrieved leader, and that’s justice. (The “blindness” of US justice has always been overstated, as the Central Park Five case made all too clear, but take a moment to consider how much worse things might have turned out for them if Trump had actual state power at his disposal at the time.)

What is true in the Oversight Republicans’ statement is that the new photos from the Epstein files do not show any actual wrongdoing (they just look really, really bad by implication). What is presumably also true is that releasing the photos was also a political move, even if the Democratic committee members do in fact care about the survivors. They are politicians, after all. Why would they waste an obvious moment of intense public attention on something they couldn’t benefit from politically? (This has less to do with the cynicism of these particular Democrats than the cynicism that is built into representative democracy in the first place.)

So with all of that in mind, the Republican committee members’ statement can conceivably be reinterpreted as follows:

We can’t say that Democrats’ adverse statements about President Trump aren’t true, but we definitely won’t say that they are true either. Nothing in the documents we’ve received shows any wrongdoing. Ranking Member Robert Garcia and Oversight Democrats are pointing out something sordid and they are doing it wrong by showing that it involves people we like, which is bad because it puts politics above Dear Leader’s perpetual quest for vengeance against his personal enemies in the name of the survivors.

After that statement was released, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson issued her own statement saying “We have repeatedly made it clear that we cannot say the Democrats’ adverse statements about Trump are false, but we are still not saying that they’re true.”

Okay, her exact words were: “The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked.” Is there really any meaningful difference?

The point is that the breathless language of “hoaxes” and “fake news” is no longer merely the personal ranting of one guy whose connection to reality has long been in question. It is not even just the stuff of talking points concocted by unseen party committees and aired on Sunday morning talk shows so they can be repeated nonstop for a week. Now it is creeping into the official state jargon that is doled out to a press corps that is increasingly hand-picked by the administration, led by people who are openly supportive of it, or just generally cowed.

These statements happen to also have been released the same week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered official State Department documents to be published using Times New Roman. Under the Biden administration, the preferred font was changed to Garamond on the grounds that sans-serif fonts are easier to read for people with impairments like low vision or dyslexia. Rubio’s argument for changing it was that Times New Roman is more in keeping with “the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications” and would “restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work.”

Presentation is everything, but content is subjective and constantly up for grabs under a state power that has transcended most of whatever accountability it once claimed.

In MAGA world, there is still a nebulous elite perpetuating “hoaxes” that have been “debunked,” despite the extraordinary degree of power commanded by a billionaire president, his billionaire colleagues, and their army of minions. That will always be the case under the current regime because it has to be. But for now we can rest assured that if it is on the right stationery and in the right font, then it must be true. It would seem shameful and disgusting to claim otherwise.