The Republican party has made it clear it doesn’t like pronouns. But two in particular have become the seething core of the worldview it holds: “they” and “them”.
Just hours after the former president was shot at on 13 July, Cory Mills, a Republican US representative from Florida, posted on X: “First they tried to silence him. Then they tried to imprison him. Now they try to kill him.”
Mills didn’t need to explain what he meant by “they”, because for his fellow Republicans, it was obvious. Never mind that the actual shooter was soon thereafter revealed to be a 20-year-old white, native-born American male and a registered Republican. Regardless of who pulled the trigger, the actual enemy was always going to be “they” and “them” – the woke, the left, the mainstream media, the consortium of vengeful losers and thwarted despoilers of the American way of life that Trump, in all of his muscular patriotism, claimed to stand defiantly against.
Republicans abhor “they” and “them” not just in their gender usage (though they have expended plenty of rage at how the terms have been embraced by those whose identity doesn’t sit at either of the binary endcaps). For the right, the terms have become something more, enigmatic signifiers of lurking dread, of implacable alienness, of a vast and increasingly visible enemy both within and just beyond America’s borders.
And despite his promises to use his nomination as an opportunity to foster civic healing and national harmony, Donald Trump went even further in weaponizing the pronouns at the Republican national convention, giving them an explicitly racist and xenophobic spin as he held forth about how America’s “immigration crisis” was spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land” and decried the way that our nation’s cities were being “flooded” by the “greatest…
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