I Love the Inflation: A Tour of Trump's Private Dictionary

Donald Trump loves inflation. He told reporters so, in the Oval Office, the way a man tells you he loves his mother. Prices in America had just touched a three-year-high, and the President looked at the figure and swooned. I love the inflation, he said.

Don't call it madness. He was being honest. Trump has loved inflation for years, because it is the one thing he is good at. Not to the dollar. To the dictionary where words lose value as his term progresses.

The man works like this. A word turns up, carrying a meaning fixed by a few centuries of use. Trump finds that meaning a nuisance. Most of us, stuck on a hard word, reach for a dictionary. He reaches for his own, where the word keeps its spelling and loses its soul.

Inflation itself is the freshest example. In January, at Davos, he stood before the great and the rich and announced that he had defeated inflation. Defeated. Five months later, he is in love with it. When you can pronounce a thing dead and then marry it, words are not your problem. They are your servants.

His true love is tariff. He calls it the most beautiful word in the language, ranked just behind God and love, which is generous billing for a tax. And that is the trick. A tariff is paid by the importing country, which means the American at the till pays it, but Trump has spent a decade selling it as a gift foreigners drop at the border. The morning he taxed his own people, he called it Liberation Day. The only thing liberated was the money in their wallets.

The method does not change in war. A ceasefire, in plain speech, is when the shooting stops. In Trumpese, there is a brief pause during which you bomb the other fellow very hard, so that he learns to appreciate peace. His own Defence Secretary went on television to promise the enemy a hard night of bombing, offered as the peace plan. A blockade gets the same handling. When Iran shuts down the Strait of Hormuz and the world's oil starts to choke, that is terrorism, piracy, a crime against humanity. When Washington does the squeezing, it becomes maximum pressure, which sounds less like a war crime and more like Cockroach Janata Party. The hand on the throat is the same. The pressure is the same. The meaning is not.

Then comes his favourite word of all, deal. He wrote a whole book on the art of it and governs as though he lost his copy. A threat is a deal. A phone call is a deal. A framework no one has signed is the biggest deal in history. Nowhere has the habit cost more than Iran. He inherited a working agreement, the JCPOA, and called it the worst deal ever made. Under that worst deal, Iran had capped its enrichment at a harmless 3.67%, cut its uranium stockpile by 98%, and let the inspectors in. He tore the paper up anyway, demanded zero enrichment, and went hunting for something far better.

Look at the far better now. He started a war. Iran promptly remembered it sits on the Strait of Hormuz and can throttle a fifth of the planet's oil at will. Prices climbed, inflation climbed behind them, and the deal on the table today is worse than the one he burned. Before the fighting, Iran had offered more. Now, after the bombs, Tehran offers a five-year freeze against his demand for twenty, and the two sides are nowhere near each other. He is asking for less, getting nothing, and calling it negotiating from strength. The strength is hard to spot. The petrol pump is not. He keeps promising prices will come down like a rock once the war ends, which is true of most things once you drop them.

The older entries you know by heart. Any inquiry that points his way is a witch hunt; any true report he dislikes is fake news, any reporter who files it is an enemy of the people. Three clean ideas, each turned into a slur against the person doing the work.

His masterpiece in the genre is the sixth of January. A mob smashed into the Capitol, beat the police, hunted the Vice President and tried to overturn an election. Trump now calls it a day of love. The rioters are patriots. The jailed ones are hostages, as though men sentenced for assaulting policemen are being held by pirates. On a lazier day they are tourists, the sort who break your door and use your office as a toilet. He did not deny it. He renamed it, the way you rename a scandal you cannot hide. Even the phone call that got him impeached, where he squeezed a foreign president for dirt, he calls perfect, a word our aunts reserve for unbeaten scores and arranged matches.

And when the facts will not move, he moves the map. The Gulf of Mexico is now, by Presidential order, the Gulf of America. We Indians should not laugh too loudly. We are world champions of this event. We rename a city, a station and a road, straight face, fresh foundation stone. But at least we rename a place to claim it. He renames it and assumes the job is done.

Which is why his confession this week was the truest thing he has said all year. Inflation is what happens when you keep printing something until it buys less and less, until a note that once fetched a meal now fetches a glucose biscuit pack that contains less biscuit because raising the MRP would sound like inflation. Trump has been doing that to language for years, printing meaning the way a panicked treasury prints notes. Every word he touches is worth a little less than it was yesterday.

Whenever he manages to end the war, rest assured, it will be the greatest deal ever. The most magnificent victory. You will have to accept it. The new meaning of victory. And deal.

- Ends