When New York Times reporters describe the effect that President Trump is having on Washington culture, political stability, international trade, and federal departments, they routinely turn to the trusty verb upend. It’s a preening gym rat of a word, in that it’s weaker than it looks. At first encounter, it implies a tantrum or violent disruption — a losing player overturning a Monopoly board in pique, say, or the S.S. Poseidon capsizing. But in its most literal sense, it means taking an object—a pool cue, a hardcover book—that’s lying flat and turning it up by 90 degrees. That’s not an especially outlaw act. (Merriam-Webster’s second definition, “to affect to the point of being upset or flurried,” includes a deliciously vivid image from the humorist Wolcott Gibbs: “a … literary shocker, designed to upend the credulous matrons.” That would involve the reverse 90-degree motion, blowing the presumably vertical ladies to the floor.)
This odd, slightly precious word has been promoted to Times multitool, handy for all gradations of change, from modest adjustment to outright catastrophe. It crops up in half a dozen different articles each day. Just recently, the diamond trade upended the world of an Amazonian indigenous people, a looming trade war threatened to do the same to the global economy, death by pollution upended families in an Italian town, and the president’s executive orders on gender upended … everything in a New Hampshire school district. The word gets applied liberally to marriages, businesses, routines, diets, and anything else that goes well with consistency. But its success has surely been fueled by the return of the upender-in-chief, Donald Trump. (It is also short enough to fit into the tight letter count of a print headline, which probably helps it along too.)
Upend’s ubiquity is recent. In 2013, the Times used it 465 times, a daily-and-then-some habit that didn’t rise to the level of abuse. The frequency doubled over the next six years, then doubled again, to 1,842 instances in 2020, the year that COVID and the presidential election had writers scrabbling through the vocabulary of disruption. The word has now settled comfortably into the discourse, one of the many ways in which American English has adapted to a new political turbulence.
Trump has already hit language very strongly, and not just because of his own idiosyncratic manner of speech. As the Times has noted, his administration has developed a confounding but effective bizarro-world stylebook, in which phrases like “free speech” are deployed to quash exactly that. Trump’s propagandists have also turned progressive vocabulary into a set of demonic incantations: Equity has become such a loaded word that Americans may soon need another term to measure the value of their homes.
That focused determination to re-engineer public expression has left everyone else in the same position as Gibbs’s bewildered matrons. One sparkling neologism did pop up during the campaign season, when reporters were mainlining coffee as they attempted to make sense of Trump’s pronouncements: sanewashing. The Times defended itself against accusations that it had committed the sin of turning fragmented blather into comprehensible statements, but otherwise that term barely made it into its pages. Columnist Paul Krugman used it twice in two days last September. He’s not at the paper anymore.
Political analysts, constantly trying to balance shock and sobriety, have come up with curiously limp imagery to describe the way the president and his minions have been dynamiting the state, betraying science, abandoning the world’s poor, bullying nations, and grinding up laws. The Times recently quoted an expert on international relations assessing the new devastation: “The guardrails are gone and the adults have left the room.” Each of the competing metaphors invokes a safety measure that depends on cooperation: A guardrail works only until a truck deliberately smashes through it; a grownup is easily defeated by a pack of inflamed toddlers. Even more pathetically, journalists regularly decry the violation of norms, as if Trump were using the wrong fork for oysters.
One problem with these muffled, generic idioms is that it feels like there are no actual writers behind them—as if words were being spat out by the one entity that reporters fear far more than a hostile president: AI. Institutions often greet authoritarian governments with preemptive compliance, the same technique that dogs learn. The Times hasn’t done that with Trump, but it may be suicidally inclined to emulate more impersonal future masters. When you fear the bots, writing like them is not the answer.
It’s not really that hard to respond to Trump’s rampages in language that is appropriately direct, biting, human, and clear. Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagen Scotten showed his mastery of that skill when he resigned rather than collude in the Justice Department’s nakedly political decision to drop charges against Mayor Eric Adams: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
