Since his rise to the political stage in 2015, Donald Trump has emphasized the urgency of a linguistic reform: To "make America great again" it is imperative to abolish periphrastic circumlocutions and embrace a firm stance against the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Yet this call for semantic transparency and performative effectiveness has been paralleled by the frequent deployment of indirectness and sophisticated forms of discursive manipulation, which I call metapragmatic gaslighting. Drawing on a corpus of statements, interventions, and interviews by President Trump, this article examines the basic principles of the language reform of the New Right and describes how metapragmatic gaslighting preludes to establishing a linguistic state of exception. Characterized by the suspension of shared norms for the use and interpretation of utterances, this emerging regime of pragmatic unaccountability materializes an ultrareactionary and hypercapitalist linguistic order.
Gaslighting and conspiracization mark two convergent crises of interpretation in the digital age. Gaslighting manipulates perception by denying intent; conspiracization overreads intent, recoding critique's idioms as proof of hidden design. The problem is not confined to misinformation but emerges instead where the forms and tones of critique themselves become objects of suspicion. Examining catchphrases like historian Yuval Noah Harari's "hackable animals" and the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset," this article shows how speculative foresight discourse is reframed online as elite confession. Empirical analysis of Amazon's "also bought" metadata networks reveals how conspiracy bestsellers cluster with critical texts, generating ambient legitimacy within digital infrastructures. Conspiracization thus emerges as critique's mimetic double: borrowing its style while stripping its reflexivity. The task is to recalibrate suspicion-distinguishing between practices that illuminate complexity and those that collapse it into plot.
While "Trumpism" usually means the movement Donald Trump has come to lead to great political effect, it also is a term that best describes a metapragmatic discourse Trump and his acolytes have come to use to normalize their extremism. Trumpism as a discourse relies on three primary verbal maneuvers: gaslighting, co-opting, and boomeranging. Gaslighting, the most commonly referred to maneuver, is deflecting criticism by saying that the problem is something other than what the critic alleged. Co-opting is adopting the language of your critics so that you are the one with the just cause and they are the ones deserving of condemnation. Boomeranging is sending criticism directed at you right back at your critics. This article examines, by way of examples, how the effectiveness of gaslighting is enhanced when combined with co-opting and boomeranging to normalize extremism to the point that now it is furthering authoritarian rule under Trump.
Judges sometimes deceive the public as to how they will rule-or how they have ruled-in important cases. To be confirmed to our highest courts, they often hide or downplay their moral and political commitments, despite being nominated specifically for those commitments. To justify their rulings, they couch their reasoning in antiseptic legal terms, even when we have excellent cause to see such reasoning as pretextual. This essay argues that such forms of judicial deceit are disturbingly common, deeply harmful, and appropriately understood as a form of gaslighting.
Victims often describe gaslighting as having a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" quality. In this essay, I explore victims' descriptions of the two-faced nature of gaslighting, showing how they come to feel caught between two irreconcilable realities in gas-lighting relationships. They describe gaslighting as creating a fracture between themselves and their broader social environments; they describe feeling that their gaslighter was able to identify something true about them and wrap it up in lies; and they describe their sense of self becoming "lost." I argue that these findings should push us to think about how broader systems of power and inequality, like intimate experiences of gaslighting, also have a two-faced nature.
