Of all Donald Trump’s rhetorical predilections, one that goes largely unmentioned is his addiction to superlatives. No one has ever seen anything like virtually everything he brings up. Why does he do this? And what does it reveal?
Much of the disinformation in Trump’s nonstop perjuries comes in the form of gross, almost comic exaggeration: He has the largest crowds anyone has ever seen (while his opponent’s are nonexistent, generated by artificial intelligence); the Democrats are not just pro-abortion-rights, they’ve made executing babies legal in six states; as well as whatever it was he said today.
A quick look at Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention in July shows that his dependence on superlatives has overtaken all his other oratorical habits. He used them to describe almost everything he discussed. The criminalization of political disagreement is “at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” The “inflation crisis” is “crushing our people like never before. They’ve never seen anything like it.” As for the “illegal immigration crisis,” well, “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it” either.
When discussing his own presidency, Trump said, “We had an economy the likes of which nobody, no nation had ever seen.” Also under Trump, “We had the most secure border and the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world.” That takes us halfway through the speech.
Trump’s reliance on superlatives continued at last week’s presidential debate. Between informing us that pets were on the menu in Springfield, Ohio, and that Kamala Harris wants to perform transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison, he told us that he has “the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics” and that “migrant crime” is “happening at levels no one thought possible.”
This type of rhetoric is not new. Vesna Mikolič, a Slovenian scholar of linguistics, analyzed the speeches of four of the original Italian fascists of the 1920s. She found that an increased intensity of their language, including hyperbole and superlatives, correlated with their detachment from reality, as well as with incitements to violence, and with actual violence. Mikolič calls this kind of oratory — as when Trump promises to “lead America to new heights of greatness like the world has never seen before” — the “fascist imaginary.”
Once a leader commits to hyperbole, he stays committed. As Richard Evans reminds us in his book “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich,” Adolf Hitler claimed that his invasion of France was the most “glorious victory of all time” and that he was the greatest military leader ever — greater than Napoleon or Caesar.
Federico Finchelstein, an Argentinian fascism expert, says such leaders “fantasize about creating new realities and ultimately transform reality to fit their fantasies.” For example, Hitler claimed that Jews were disease-ridden subhumans and then created the conditions that made him prophetic. The fascist’s aim, says Finchelstein, is “the destruction of any trace of demonstrable truth.” And the philosopher Hannah Arendt says “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is … people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
Finchelstein also notes that fascism cannot ascend without existential enemies. Every fight is urgent, and every enemy is mortal. It’s as if all the struggles between good and evil in our omnipresent superhero movies feed Trump’s delusion that he does not live by the rules governing mere mortals. (His new collection of NFT trading cards, $99 each, depicts him as a superhero, the American flag serving as his cape.)
“We had no wars,” the former president said in his convention speech. “I could stop wars with just a telephone call.” According to this logic, if Trump is reelected, all war will cease due to his irresistible charm, with which he has befriended the “genius” Vladimir Putin, the “fantastic” Victor Orbán of Hungary and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is “doing a spectacular job.”
These foreign despots are his comrades, while Trump’s existential enemies come from within. Joe Biden is a destroyer of democracy; Harris is a communist, a Marxist and a radical-left lunatic. And both, of course, are liars.
Projection, according to Finchelstein, is another central characteristic of the wannabe dictator. “Fascists always deny who they are and attribute their own characteristics … to their enemies.” Trump’s projection makes enemies of his own countrymen, whom he blames for his growing legal peril. As the forces of justice align against him, the superlatives escalate. He has framed this election as a battle between good and evil because for him, it is indeed a desperate and stark struggle to avoid accountability.
On their podcast “Shrinking Trump,” the psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal identify the increasing simplicity of Trump’s vocabulary and worldview as a sign of cognitive decline, which it very well may be. But it is also a feature of fascism. Trump has always lied, but his fantasies have now reached a level that no one has ever seen before.
Laurie Winer is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the author of “Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical.”