President Donald Trump represents a threat to all organic life on the planet, denying as he does the existence of climate change and toy as he does with our country’s horrible nuclear arsenal. But he also represents a threat to language itself. Whether it’s his iterative, rambling, accusatory spoken dialogue; his terse, pugnacious Twitter musings; or the apocalyptic vocabulary used by his speechwriter and boss Steve Bannon, he uses words to fundamentally refigure meaning, creating a world in which he is right, America is first, and everything else is bad.
An article today on The Awl proposes, convincingly, that the anti-Trump resistance movement and its elected allies must adopt the rhetoric and language of Trump in order to combat it. That’s what a slate of countries in Europe is already doing. Last week a television show in The Netherlands parodied Trump’s “America first!” slogan with a “Netherlands second” video, turning his own hotheaded, insult-riddled linguistic choices against him. Dutch has “all the best words,” it claims, and the Netherlands features “the best ponypark in the world”:
It’s being joined by many other countries, each abusing Trump’s rhetoric in order to promote themselves. Each was produced by its country’s satirical late-night talk shows. Here’s Switzerland, “the sexiest country in Europe”:
Germany claims to be “the orangest country in Europe”:
Denmark attempts to sell Trump on the deliciousness of rye bread and the lovability of actor Mads Mikkelsen: