Christian Schneider

Opinion columnist

It's not as if we didn't know Donald Trump was a lexical car crash before he was elected president of the United States. His choppy, repetitive verbal pugilism may have made some voters actually feel better about themselves. If you had always dreamed of being a more cogent public speaker than the president, now there's a pretty decent chance it's true.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have a president that doesn't speak the Queen's English, but one of Trump's particular verbal tricks is doing damage to the language. He has a habit of slamming a modifier into a word with a commonly accepted meaning, thereby damaging our understanding of the original word.

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For example, how many people now think “news” can be “fake”? Or take, for instance, his staff's creation of the term “alternative facts.” A “fact” is something that is true — modifying the word with the qualifying “alternative” is a verbal hit-and-run. Let's hope the word “facts” has collision insurance.

Yet Trump's most daring attempt at word surgery came last week when he aptly took to Twitter to defend his use of social media. Strangling every bit of life from his allotted 140 characters, Trump used all-caps to declare his stream-of-consciousness musings not “presidential,” but “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.”

To paraphrase The Princess Bride's Inigo Montoya, Trump keeps using the word “presidential.” I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Allowing Trump to rob “presidential” of meaning with the “modern day” revolver could forever change how we expect our presidents to act. The word “presidential” itself means certain things — among them, the expectation that our chief executives perform their duties with dignity and self-restraint.

But “modern day presidential” is to “presidential” what “Facebook” is to “book” — they describe two entirely different things. (Unless the book you are reading helps you check up on how much weight your boyfriend from high school has gained, in which case they're pretty much the same thing.)

Trump has defended himself with circular logic, arguing that literally everything the president does is “presidential” as long as it's the president that does it. Thus, if Donald Trump ends a press conference by trying to stuff live lobsters into a foreign leader's pants, suddenly the word “presidential” morphs into something completely different altogether. (If you think that sounds far-fetched, at his appearance in Warsaw last week with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump complained that NBC wasn't nice enough to him despite all the money he made for them on The Apprentice. The only thing missing was a couple of crustaceans.)

In fairness, what we consider to be “presidential” has changed over the years. Before Woodrow Wilson, it wouldn't have been considered “presidential” for a president to lobby Congress on behalf of legislation. Further, chief executives have always used new technologies to appear “modern day presidential.”

But these examples can only bend backwards so far before they break. Citizens were able to listen to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's groundbreaking “fireside chats” without wanting to actually hurl themselves into flames to make them stop.

Actually, while Trump thinks lobbying plastic surgery insults on Twitter makes him look “modern,” it harkens back to a long-past era when presidents could actually get away with intemperate remarks. For instance, Teddy Roosevelt was famous for belittling his opponents with withering jibes — he once said his predecessor, William McKinley, had “no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.” In the run-up to World War I, the bombastic former president called pacifists opposing American entry into the war “old women of both sexes.”

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The method of delivery is now certainly different, but the temperament is similar. And it's not exactly a selling point for modernity that presidents may now go back to indulging their most base impulses. (Roosevelt was also famously a tough guy who had fought bravely in wars — Trump's sniveling reeks of feelings of playground inadequacy.)

When Donald Trump leaves the White House, he can take the china, he can take the chairs, and he can take the pens. But please give Americans their word back. We get to decide what it means, not him.

Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Follow him on Twitter @Schneider_CM.

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