President Donald Trump's "verbal tic" is creating "cognitive dissonance in America," according to a Washington Post column.
“The verbal tic of President Donald Trump that has always most fascinated me is his predilection for the word ‘beautiful,’" Monica Hesse wrote.
Giving several examples of the usage, she said, “On Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order titled ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.’ Golf courses are beautiful, but so are White House telephones, farming, fighter jets, notes from the Chinese president, chocolate cake, the Supreme Court, Harambe the gorilla, and Christians.”
Hesse questioned, “Is this a vocabulary deficit?”
“Trump uses ‘beautiful’ to describe sleeping gas (‘They have a gas that’s a beautiful sleeping gas’). He uses it to describe fossil fuels (‘clean, beautiful coal’).” She even noted a list from Politico, which aggregated “weird times” he’s used the word beautiful.
“To be told that something is beautiful when it seems ugly to you is not a linguistic problem — it’s a worldview problem,” Hesse said. “It’s not gaslighting, exactly, but it leads to cognitive dissonance, to looking out the window and wondering how other people can see what you’re seeing and think it looks so radically different, or if they’re even seeing the same thing at all.”
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“‘Beautiful’ is an adjective that describes a thing,” the columnist wrote, “but it’s also a reflection on the person using it: what they care about, what they think is worth saving.”
Taking aim at the ‘big, beautiful bill,' Hesse asked, “Do we think it’s beautiful to make it harder for families to see doctors when they’re sick? To make it harder to feed their children? Is it beautiful to make it easier to buy gun silencers? Is it beautiful to charge asylum seekers $1,000 to apply for safety?”
“The Big Beautiful Bill works for Donald Trump because it uses a common, euphonious word to sell a tantalizing concept: that the federal government is simple instead of being a giant, complicated mess,” she said.
Hesse believes Trump is using the phrase because “The Big Beautiful Bill is the One Ring of legislation, the only bill you’ll ever need. ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is a phrase that could lull you into believing it contained only good things. And it does not.”