Donald Trump's Final Vocabulary

Tower of Babel.

“Everybody I speak to says how horrible it is. Nobody explains to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages — we have languages coming into our country, we have nobody that even speaks those languages. They are truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them.” – Donald Trump

“You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’ But the fake news, you know what they say? ‘He rambled.’” — Donald Trump

An overlooked component of the MAGA right’s xenophobia is insistence on the supremacy of its strange, weaving dialect—and its blind fear of foreign languages. 

Indeed: what is a “foreign” language to MAGA? 

For those who, like Trump, speak in a microdialect, all languages are foreign. After all, Trump surely meant he hasn’t heard of the languages spoken by migrants to the U.S., since most people have in fact heard of Spanish and Chinese, the chief languages of migrants to the U.S.. Some 60 million Americans speak them fluently.

“Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.” — Donald Trump

To the Moms of Liberty, Trump said last week, “Our country is being poisoned. They’re going into the classrooms and taking disease. And they don’t even speak English. It’s crazy.” 

Trump’s fear of non-English languages is usually seen as a subset or extension of his racism. But his xenoglossophobia, his fear of non-English languages, can stand on its own. After all, Trump sees people of nonwhite races as a demographic that can be moved by certain rhetorical levers. But faced with those who speak languages Trump doesn’t understand—including AAVE, Southern American English, and the Standard American English taught in schools—Trump really panics.