When Words Undo Reality

For decades, American power rested not only on military strength, economic dominance, technological supremacy, or control of financial flows. It also rested on something less visible, yet just as decisive: the capacity to shape reality through narratives, institutions, and shared symbolic frameworks. Donald Trump did not create the crisis of these frameworks. He revealed it.

I. Austin: words that do things

But performatives only work because they are underwritten by institutions, conventions, and a shared world of recognition. Their force depends on what Austin called felicity conditions: the speaker must be authorized, the procedure must be recognized, the context must be appropriate. Strip these away, and the utterance is not false. It simply fails. It becomes infelicitous.

This is why political language is never merely linguistic. It presupposes a symbolic order.

II. Trump: words that perforate

The contemporary American crisis reveals something more troubling still.

Many of Trump’s statements fail as performatives. Declaring an election stolen does not make it stolen. Calling unfavorable information “fake news” does not refute it. Announcing victory does not create victory. On the institutional level, these utterances often remain empty: no court, no recognized procedure, and no shared authority validate them.

And yet they produce effects.

They mobilize supporters. They seize public attention. They generate loyalty, outrage, suspicion, and political energy.

More than that, they erode the common framework through which reality can be collectively assessed. This is the perlocutionary register: the effect a word actually produces, regardless of whether the act itself was institutionally valid.

We might call this phenomenon perforative speech. A performative act creates reality within a shared symbolic order. A perforative act damages the symbolic order itself.

It targets not a particular fact, but the framework that makes facts assessable. It contests not a particular institution, but the legitimacy that lets institutions mediate reality at all. It does not merely advance an argument — it corrodes the possibility of a common world in which arguments still mean anything.

Seen this way, Trump looks less like an anomaly than a symptom.

III. From Bush to Trump: the manufacture of reality as imperial logic

The roots of this phenomenon........

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