LANGUAGE: How do you describe problems like these?

THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 2025

Major journalists start using tough words: In this morning's New York Times, Thomas Friedman uses some rather tough language.

For the record, he's writing an opinion column, not a news report. Still, by the norms of high-end mainstream journalism, his language, from the start of his column right through to its end, is plainly tilting toward tough:

I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.

[...]

This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.

[...]

[T]his farce is about to touch every American...Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.

The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.

[...]

But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy—not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of [the gfrowth plan called] Made in China 2025. 

[...]

If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous.

I have never been more afraid for America’s future.

At that point, the column ends. Borrowing President Nixon's formulation, let us say this about that:

According to Friedman's language, President Trump has produced an administration which is "a cruel farce"—a cruel farce which is re-fashioning the United States as "a rogue state."

In Friedman's very first sentence, he says that things (plural) which are "crazy" are happening "every day!" They're happening because of the president's "rogue behavior"—behavior which features "wild on-and-off" policy shifts.

The president is a "strongman," Friedman writes—an "impulsive" strongman at that.

 For the record, we're not saying that any of those assessments are "wrong." We're saying that, by journalistic norms, Friedman is using unusually tough language—a type of language which, by tradition, has rarely been used.

Just last week, David Brooks took a similar turn. 

Brooks tends to be calm and mild-mannered in his public demeanor. We offer that as a compliment.

That said, last Friday morning, a different tone emerged. Back when the nation was still discussing those off-and-on tariff announcements, Brooks went with such language as this at the end of this New York Times column:

Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime

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What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side—from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature—self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.

Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime—relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.

Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.

Within the boundaries of high-end journalism, "stupid" has long been a relatively uncommon term. 

We ourselves have specifically said that our journalists need to start deploying that language in certain current circumstances. In a departure from his normal demeanor, Brooks went all in on that term in this column.  

(As with Friedman, so too here. Brooks also noted the president's alleged "impulsivity.") 

His anguished column went with "stupid" in its headline and then as it ended. Trump's policy was said to be stupid, but Trump was called stupid too.

Tomorrow, we'll evaluate this first flight on the part of the mild-mannered Brooks toward the use of that rather tough term. For today, we'll proceed to the tough recent language of a third major journalist.

"Stupid is as stupid does," Mother Gump frequently said. By last week, it wasn't just Brooks who was employing that term. 

Steven Pearlstein is a Pulitzer-winning journalist (2008). He served as an economics / business columnist at the Washington Post through 2021. 

Pearlstein is a long-time, fully sober economics journalist. But last Friday, the Washington Post published this aggressive guest essay, in which he too decided to go with that tough term: 

Trump’s tariffs were rash. But the reckoning was inevitable.

[...]

To be clear: As originally designed, Trump’s “reciprocal” tariff regime was stupid for many reasons.

Stupid because it serves no purpose to put tariffs on goods that we cannot produce, such as bananas, coffee and vanilla and winter fruits and vegetables, or goods that a high-wage company should not produce, such as inexpensive clothing, toys, sneakers, TVs and other household appliances. Such tariffs simply raise prices for consumers with no benefits to workers. Stupid because many of the goods subject to tariffs are inputs to goods and services produced by highly paid American workers and sold around the world by hugely profitable American companies.

Stupid because achieving a better overall trade balance, which is what matters economically, doesn’t require achieving balance with every country.

Stupid because, with the economy at or near full employment, there’s no sense in using tariffs to “create” more jobs.

Stupid because imports from poorer, developing countries are economically insignificant to the United States.

Stupid because the inevitable retaliation from other countries will reduce the high-wage jobs of our export industries in the vague hope of re-creating lower-wage jobs in industries constrained by import competition.

Pearlstein went with "stupid" again and again.  We count seven deployments in all!

We're not saying that Pearlstein's assessments were right, or that is assessments were wrong. We're saying that, to our ear, this was another departure from traditional journalistic language. 

We ourselves have repeatedly recommended changes in the rules which govern journalistic language:

We've criticized the refusal to employ the language of medical science in discussing the unusual behavior of such important figures as President Trump and DOGE boss Elon Musk.

We've specifically said that journalists should abandon their traditional avoidance of the language of stupidity—though we think we've only applied that advice to the (largely non-existent) coverage of the ludicrous pseudo-journalism which is endlessly seen all over the Fox News Channel.

We also think that journalists should set aside traditional courtesies in which they avoid discussing extremely unusual personal histories of major public figures where such unusual histories exist. 

That would include unusual personal histories in the realm of sexuality, marriage and romance, and in the use of drugs. It would also include extremely unusual childhood histories—though we've long recommended that you should pity the child.

We've never suggested that any such changes could necessarily change the world. We've suggested that such changes could imaginably create a world in which the behaviors of various public figures are being more accurately described.

How do you describe a problem like some of the problems we currently face? It seems to us that some experienced journalists are moving away from some old restrictions governing their uses of language.

Was it a good idea when Friedman called Trump's policies stupid? Was it a good idea when Brooks said that Trump himself is stupid?

We'll discuss those questions tomorrow. Also, we'll dive into this latest striking report from the Wall Street Journal concerning the manifest personal strangeness of a possible "stumblebum," by which we mean Elon Musk.

How do you describe a problem like Elon Musk? Tomorrow, our discussion continues. 

Full disclosure:

Almost surely, none of this could actually make a difference at this point. Thanks (in part) to Blue America's remarkable failures, in our view it's most likely a bit too late for that.

Tomorrow: Stumblebum is as stumblebum does? In this case, we'll say that!