Trump Ruins Irony, Too
I’ve been mildly obsessed with air quotes and their cousin, scare quotes, for years. They are typically used when a term appears in quotation marks for reasons other than being a direct quotation
.. they indicate “epistemic uncertainty.”
.. We use air quotes for many reasons. There’s the conspiratorial use, as when Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Obama’s legitimacy by referring to him as the “quote ‘president’ ” during his campaign. That, you might say, is old-fashioned, street-fighting politics.
.. If everything is air-quotable, then what does anything really mean?
.. The writer Greil Marcus argues that such scare quotes “are a writer’s assault on his or her own words.” They signal writers’ fears, he says, of the very words they’re using.
.. He and Mr. Spicer are employing ironic techniques not comically but cynically — to destabilize meaning.
.. “Air quotes eliminate the responsibility for one’s actions, one’s choices.” In the president’s hands, air quotes are apparently a way to push an alternate reality — one that’s often defined after the fact.
.. Mr. Trump’s most recent air-quoting supports his basic critique of elites — that we in the media, or in cities, or in blue states, take things too seriously. Of course he doesn’t really grab women’s genitalia. That’s just locker room talk. He “grabs” women’s “genitalia.” Of course Mr. Obama didn’t wiretap. He “wiretapped.”
.. The paradox is that President Trump has turned an invention of the urbane and educated against them. He has weaponized irony.