The Dictatorship
Team Trump keeps claiming credit for coming up with phrases that already existed
About a year ago, Robert O’Brien, who served as Donald Trump’s White House national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs magazine that began with a little history lesson.
“If you want peace, prepare for war is a Latin phrase that emerged in the fourth century that means ‘If you want peace, prepare for war,’” O’Brien explained. “The concept’s origin dates back even further, to the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, to whom is attributed the axiom, ‘Peace through strength — or, failing that, peace through threat.’”
In other words, the adage “peace through strength” is nearly two millennia old. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt might not know that.
“Nobody knows what it means to accomplish peace through strength better than President Trump,” she told Fox News this week. “He is the one who came up with that motto and that foreign policy doctrine, and he successfully implemented it in his first term.”
Right off the bat, it’s probably worth mentioning that Trump offers a poor example of “peace through strength,” given that he is neither strong nor peaceful. Similarly, the idea that the president “came up with that motto” is bizarre, even by this White House’s standards, given how often officials in the United States and around the world have used the phrase for generations.
But watching the clip, I was also reminded of the familiarity of the circumstances.
Last month, for example, the president tried to defend his administration’s trade policies, arguing“Basically, what we’re doing is equalizing. That’s a new word that I came up with.”
According to Merriam Webster, the word “equalizing” has been around for centuries. It is not a word that Trump “came up with.”
Last year, the Republican, while talking about immigration, also said, “The caravan. I made up that name, too.” No, he didn’t: The word “caravan” dates back to the 16th century.
Perhaps the most notable example came early on in the president’s first term when he sat down with journalists from The Economist and explained that he was cutting taxes, despite a growing budget deficit, because “we have to prime the pump.”
Trump added, “Have you heard that expression before, for this particular type of an event?” When the editor from The Economist said he was, of course, familiar with the metaphor, the president concluded, “Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just … I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good.”
He was not responsible for “prime the pump,” which was in use long before Trump was even born.
To expect honesty from this White House is obviously unwise, but — even by Team Trump standards — pretending over and over again that the president “came up with” words and phrases that have long existed is quite weird.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”