Trump's Grammatical Time Machine

Politics

Jay Stooksberry | 11.20.2024 1:40 PM

If Back to the Future 4 ever becomes a reality, the plot should feature President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Like Marty McFly and Emmett Brown, Trump spent an inordinate amount of time inserting himself in the past, crafting speculative fiction along the way.

In traditional speculative fiction, the author asks the "what if" question. In The Man in the High Castle, Philip Dick asked, "What if the Axis Powers not only won World War II but also occupied the United States?" Stephen King's 11/22/63 asked, "What if somebody killed Lee Harvey Oswald before he could kill JFK?" In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth asked, "What if Charles Lindbergh was president instead of FDR?"

For Trump, one question haunts his fevered dreams: What if he won the 2020 election? To answer this question, Trump relies on a grammatical sleight-of-hand known as conditional structure.

For those unfamiliar with conditional grammar, please bear with this quick, impromptu grammar lesson. A conditional sentence demonstrates a possible situation or consequence, typically introduced with a dependent clause starting with if.

Most conditional sentences—often referred to as zero and first conditionals—strictly articulate facts and plausible outcomes:

Zero conditional: If heated, ice melts.

First conditional: If Republicans win the House of Representatives, they will effectively control all three branches of the federal government.

But there are conditionals reserved for spurious speculation, too. Second conditionals postulate about unreal or improbable situations, while third conditionals ruminate on a revered past that never happened. The former relies on past simple verbs and infinitives, and the latter on past perfect and past participles. Both use the modal verb would in the independent clause.

To better understand the second and third conditionals, a quick examination of Trump's campaign rhetoric provides ample examples.

Historical revisionism fuels Trump's grammatical time machine.

Trump's central campaign hypothesis was as obvious as it was circular: If he had been president when all the bad things happened, the........

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