What Are Words For

“My lips are moving and the sound’s coming out,

The words are audible, but I have my doubts.”

So begins Words, the 1982 synth-pop lament by Missing Persons. The chorus lands harder: What are words for when no one listens anymore? It’s a song about failed communication, framed from the side of the receiver—someone straining to be heard and wondering why meaning never arrives.

But what if the failure runs the other way? What if the receiver is listening too closely, desperately trying to extract meaning from communication that is fundamentally meaningless?

That question sits at the center of our so-called post-truth era—a condition in which objective facts matter less than emotion, identity, and belief. Post-truth politics tends to travel with populism and grows out of collapsing trust in institutions, expertise, and media. Add informational overload to the mix, and the result is not ignorance, but exhaustion. We are drowning in words.

Trump exploits this environment instinctively. He uses language like buckshot—wild, imprecise, and scattershot. The damage isn’t concentrated; it’s diffuse. Part of the problem is not that we don’t listen to him, but that we listen far too carefully.

Trump’s words are not arguments. They are not even lies in the conventional sense. To lie, words must first mean something. For trump, words are sounds emitted to satisfy a fleeting emotional impulse—anger, grievance, envy, dominance. Once uttered, they evaporate. It’s as if they never existed, because to him, in any substantive sense, they didn’t.

This is why contradiction doesn’t bother him. Why yesterday’s threat doesn’t bind today’s denial. Why promises carry no weight. There is no internal ledger of consistency, because there is no internal commitment to meaning.

Seen through this lens, Greenland becomes instructive.

Greenland does not exist to trump as a real place with people, language, culture, or history. It exists as a shape on a map—a large white mass, a jagged outline. Something you might draw with a Sharpie, like the cone of impact he improvised on the weather map to show the hurricane path he desired. Or something you might want simply because someone else has it. His understanding of its past—“a boat landed there”—has the depth of a children’s picture book.

So when trump threatened that the United States needed to “own” Greenland, those words were mostly sound effect in order to get some response. Distraction. Concern. Fear. 

The problem, of course, is that when the President of the United States speaks, words must be taken seriously regardless of intent. The office may have lost its moral authority under trump, but it still wields real power. And if the goal is simply to be taken seriously, as it is for trump, then any words will do—especially alarming ones. Exaggeration has more impact, which is why trump exaggerates constantly. Being feared or obeyed feels good to him precisely because, at some level, he knows he is not a serious person.

This creates the central paradox of the trump era: how do you take an unserious man seriously because he occupies a serious position?

The media’s solution has been to invent meaning where none exists. Pundits and analysts “interpret” his statements, construct plausible strategic rationales, and translate incoherent ranting into policy signals. This process—often called sane-washing—is not only misleading, it is counterproductive. It treats nonsense as strategy and impulse as intention.

Trump’s words should be understood by their effects, not their meanings. And effects are determined not by the speaker’s intention, but by the audience’s response. That shifts agency back to us.

Predictably, trump then trapped himself. By declaring he would get Greenland “one way or another,” he destroyed any chance of negotiated cooperation. If you were Denmark, would you agree to increased U.S. military presence knowing the Commander in Chief openly questioned your sovereignty? Having dismissed Denmark’s ownership outright, trump made trust impossible. Any concession would be reckless.

Did he mean any of it? Almost certainly not. But meaninglessness cuts both ways. Words without meaning also produce agreements without meaning. Negotiation with a bad-faith actor like trump is futile, or worse, dangerous.

There is no Greenland deal. There is no framework. There is only face-saving language and a gradual dissipation of an “urgent security concern” that never existed beyond the moment it was uttered. Trump will forget it entirely and move on to the next impulse, the next public distraction.

The rest of us will not. Because unlike him, we still believe words matter. And when words are emptied of meaning by those in power, the damage does not vanish with them. It accumulates—quietly, corrosively—until communication itself begins to fail.

And then we are left, like the song asks, wondering what words are for anymore.