Thread by @AlexandraErin

A key thing to understand about Trump's declaration that "Only absentee ballots are acceptable!" is that the phrase "absentee ballot" doesn't have a clear, coast-to-coast, legally agreed upon meaning, and this is by design.

His demand is: let me invalidate votes I don't like.

The purpose of most of Trump's arguments and much of his activity is to destroy the meaning of things, the concept of meanings. "Fake news" when it started to become a thing was a specific thing, and it was "fake news sites" - lookalike sites designed to mimic news orgs.

The fake news sites in question were a combination of clickbait for money and lulz and deliberate disinfo/misinfo sites, but like, for instance something like RT or Breitbart or OANN wasn't what the experts were warning about, even as they're used for blatant propaganda.

But the fake news in question was useful to Trump... some of the mercantile purveyors admitted they had set up both conservative and progressive versions but only really scored meaningful hits on the right-wing side, and of course the foreign agents favored him.

So for him to destroy the meaning of "fake news" was a one-two, both offense and defense. He turned urgent warnings from media specialists and information scientists into partisan echo chamber noise, and also gained a label to discredit things he doesn't like.

And it is very much, very blatantly, not that he has created a new definition of fake news. If you asked him to define it, he'd name examples. He has rendered the phrase meaningless; it's something he sticks on stuff he doesn't like.

Everybody pointing out that Florida does not have a provision for absentee ballots and when the term is used in Florida it is in reference to mail-in ballots that can be requested by anyone and have no more rigorous verification than any other mail-in ballot (which, is enough!)

And this is a good thing to point out, but it's not that Trump is getting his facts wrong or even that he's just lying about in the conventional sense of trying to fool us into thinking that Florida has a formal absentee ballot that it doesn't.

He is attacking the meaning.

He is attacking the meaning of these specific words and the very concept of meaning, the idea that words have any meaning beyond that which the one with the power to speak them (the dictator) gives them.

"When I use a word," Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty said to Alice in a contemptuous tone, '"it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'"

Humpty isn't asserting the right to define words. He's denying that words have definition.

"When I use a word"... each time he uses a word, as part of the act of using a word, he chooses what it means. No inherent meaning. No definition. No truth. No reality.

People on the right often assert that progressives, liberals, feminists, "trans rights activists", "Cultural Marxists", "post-modernists", etc., are the ones doing this, whenever we have a conversation about the nuance of meaning.

But Trump does it in earnest.

"Fake news" means nothing to him.

"Enemy of the people" means nothing to him.

"Absentee ballot" means nothing to him.

"Spying" and "treason" and all the other accusations he throws around? Nothing to him.

The infamous Amy's Baking Company episode of Kitchen Nightmares had the titular nightmare saying that Ramsay didn't understand that in America words like "fresh" and "homemade" don't actually mean those things, you just call things that. Because they mean "good".

If you watch that episode -- and I neither recommend you do nor that you don't, it's interesting but uncomfortable -- you will get a brief and harrowing masterclass in the Trumpian mindset. And I don't just mean the wrongs that the couple commit on their customers and employees.

I mean the way they think, the way they approach things, the ways they believe the world works and the things they think of other people and of themselves.

The Bouzaglos are living in the same world and the same version of America that Trump lives in, a world where it makes sense for you to be out to get everyone because everyone's out to get you. Rob the other person before they rob you.

In this world, words don't have meanings, they have effects. Words with good effects, you put on yourself and your stuff. Words with bad effects, you put on everybody else.

Look at the way he talks about anything: we're living very happily, we're doing very well. Those are good words. He means *nothing* by them. The GOP health care plan that doesn't exist is always going to be very great health care with very low cost. No plan? Doesn't matter.

The plan doesn't have to exist for him to say that it's very great, that people will be happy, to put any good or useful label on it. The only thing that stops him from claiming he's offering universal healthcare all the time is that he knows his side sees that as bad.

One thing that @dynamicsymmetry pointed out to me a while back is that when he seems like he's struggling? He'll just repeat the word "strong" or "strongly", in places it doesn't quite fit and sometimes to the exclusion of other modifiers or superlatives.

Because strong = good.

So I think it's become sort of a default for him, the way "bad" has. He'll just cut right to the point. Put the good label on the things you want, put the bad label on the things you don't like. That's it.

There was some laughter when early on in his term, he and his mouthpieces like Spicer just outright said various versions of "Well, the [news/polls/whatever] are real when they're good, and fake when they're bad."

But it's not a joke. That's the world he lives in.

And bit by bit, he's dragging everybody else into that world with him. A world devoid of meaning and where the truth not only lacks power but can't even be proven to exist.

"Only Absentee Ballots acceptable!" means count the votes he wants to count and discredit the rest.

So when I say that words mean nothing to this man and that his method and his goal is to destroy their ability to mean things...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1295454897689604097