It has been abundantly clear for years that Trump is obsessed with tariffs, seeing them as a silver bullet that will magically bring back the manufacturing jobs he so nostalgically yearns for.
Fact is, the US has been losing manufacturing jobs for about 50 years—a process that is essentially beyond the control of any administration.
It is also abundantly clear that Trump is no great friend of Arab countries, having instituted a travel ban against Muslims entering the country soon after assuming the presidency in 2017.
So I wonder how Trump would react if someone told him that tariff is an Arabic word. Corey Robin, in an article in the Sidecar columns of New Left Review, recently pointed this out:
Tariff, Donald Trump has said, ‘is the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He won’t be pleased to learn that it comes from Arabic. Ta‘rīf is a notification; ‘arrafa means to make known. Despite his many notifications, Trump hasn’t really made known why he’s imposing the tariffs – or why, as of Wednesday, he has put a pause on them.
I find it more than a little ironic that the word Trump loves more than any other comes from Arabic, given his general attitude toward Arab countries.
Let’s also not forget that Trump, like Stephen Miller, seems to think that only English should be spoken in the United States. In fact, the GOP in general seems to have an obsession with English.
I sometimes wonder if this is because Donald has such a poor command of it. During his first administration, a language study found that Trump uses the most primitive language of any president in the last 90 years (Thomas B. Edsall, ‘The Whole of Liberal Democracy Is in Grave Danger at This Moment’, New York Times, July 22, 2020).
Trump presumably made English the “official” language in order to disadvantage the many Spanish-speaking people living here—whose command of English might, in some cases, be slightly worse even than Donald’s.
But what is “English” anyway? After all, words from many other languages have become part of the English vocabulary over time. Tariff is just one example out of thousands.
I’m thinking particularly of the Spanish we use in English, despite so many nativists like Stephen Miller insisting that everyone speak “English only.”
Spanish words in English include for example adobe, alligator, banana, barbecue, breeze, bronco, cafeteria, canoe, cargo, chocolate, cigar, cigarette, corral, hammock, hurricane, mosquito, patio, plaza, potato, ranch, rodeo, savvy, sherry, silo, stampede, tobacco, tomato, tuna, vanilla, vertigo, and vigilante.
So in that sense we already speak Spanish quite often. “After the barbecue, I was smoking a cigarette and enjoying the summer breeze while relaxing in a hammock on the patio of my ranch, swatting at the mosquitos...”
In addition to disadvantaging those for whom English is a second language, Trump’s desire that everyone speak English only could have negative ramifications in other respects.
Being able to speak more than one language is useful and beneficial in countless different ways. Besides broadening the mind, multilingual ability is known to improve thinking as well as slow down mental aging.
Ellen Bialystok and colleagues at York University in Toronto found that “bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes.”
Trump’s executive order making English the official language could also subtly discourage the learning of other languages. A perhaps not-undesirable side effect from the Trump GOP point of view.
Apparently it’s better to narrow the mind rather than broaden it—so much the easier to keep the population dumbed down and manipulable.
