The Changing Definition of Investigating Donald Trump – The New Yorker

Add the word investigate to the list of victims of the war on language. It joins the likes of witch hunt, fake news, and tremendous in the gallery of terms that had a widely understood meaning before the Trump Presidency but have since devolved to mean the opposite of what they used to mean, or nothing at all.

The American dictionaries define investigation as a close study or a systematic inquiry; the British add that it is a quest for truth. Somethingsay, a found objectmay not be immediately understandable and may need to be investigated. Though another thingsuch as a crime or an accidentmay be known to occur, its circumstances may need to be investigated. Something else may be merely a hypothesisthat a condition is contagious, or a remedy is effectiveand also may need to be investigated. The general meaning and purpose of an investigation is to learn more than is already known, and then, it is implied, to act on the results.

Since the story of Donald Trumps telephone conversation with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, hit the front pages last week, the meaning of the word investigate has seemed to shift. President Trump repeatedly urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden, the lead of a Washington Post story last Thursday read. The call turned into a bid by Mr. Trump to press a Ukrainian leader in need of additional American aid to do us a favor and investigate Democrats, a Times story from the same day read. Trump did not appear to be asking for a systematic study or to learn something he didnt know: he was looking to use the investigation as a cudgel. Indeed, a cudgel is what Trump seems to think an investigation is: his countless tweets and rants about Robert Muellers investigation of Russian interference in the Presidential election told us as much.

This week has brought a new crop of investigation headlines. Trump Pressed Australian Leader to Help Barr Investigate Mueller Inquirys Origins was the title of a Times story. President Donald Trump recently asked the Australian prime minister and other foreign leaders to help Attorney General William Barr with an investigation into the origins of the Russia probe that shadowed his administration for more than two years, the Justice Department said Monday, was the lead of a Post article from Tuesday. An Australian diplomat was an initial source of information about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives (or, to be more accurate, between two blowhards, one of whom appears to have exaggerated his connection to Russia while the other, George Papadopoulos, oversold his role in the Trump campaign). Because Trump views all investigations as instrumental, he believes that something largeror someone who is after himhad to be behind that early tip. This is why Investigate the investigators has become a slogan of Trumps relection campaign. In countries run by the men Trump most admiresthe Putins, Erdoans, and Dutertes of the worldall investigations have a predetermined outcome. Trump seems to share this world view, which explains his obsession with the people he imagines to be behind an investigation.

As is often the case with Trump, his word usage both amplifies ideas ambient in the culture and takes advantage of gaps in the language. Long before Trump started alleging that any investigation into his actions was the result of a conspiracy aimed at removing him from office, Hillary Clinton said the same thing, in so many words, about investigations into her husbands actions: the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President, she said, on the Today show, in 1998. Half a decade later, she wrote that she stands by her assessment of the investigation that led to her husbands impeachment. Informed, it seems, in large part by the experience of serving in Congress during the Clinton-impeachment hearings, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has deployed the threat of an investigation as a strategic weaponfollowing the conclusion of the special counsel Robert Muellers investigation, she allowed congressional investigations to proceed, but she resisted calls for an official impeachment inquiry until the Ukraine story broke. The Mueller report enumerated several clear-cut instances of obstruction of justice by Trump; one could argue that an additional investigation, in the sense of a quest for truth, was entirely unnecessary, and this too has served to fog up the meaning of the word investigation. The Times story on Pelosis announcement of the impeachment inquiry uses a form of the word investigate nine times, to mean vastly different things: the Mueller probe, the impeachment proceedings, the process that Trump tried to get Ukraine to carry out, and the ongoing post-Mueller congressional inquiry.

Language, of course, is always evolving. But a word made so flexible that anyone can use it to mean anything is a political problem. It doesnt aid communication across differences; in fact, it hinders it. The word investigation, which is certain to appear ever more frequently in political conversations in the next month, now means resistance at one extreme and digging up dirt at the other. Such a disparity doesnt bode well for words that are or ought to be related to investigation, such as trial, testimony, or truth.

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The Changing Definition of Investigating Donald Trump - The New Yorker