GOP frontrunner Donald Trump famously doesn’t care for the word “Woke” — questioning how useful the term really is “since half the people can’t define it.”
His niece Mary Trump — long a thorn in her uncle’s side — recently tried to help the former President by providing a definition. Crossing out “woke” in a Reuters headline she substituted “basic human decency.” She says she “fixed” it, but it is unlikely to stay “fixed” — that is, remain in a place of consensus.
Fixed it for you, @Reuters pic.twitter.com/mLOJdkfAbl
— Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) July 10, 2023
“I don’t like the term woke, because I hear woke woke woke,” Trump said last month, “it’s just a term they use, you know half the people can’t define it, they don’t even know what it is.”
Trump: "I don't like the term 'woke," because I hear the term 'woke woke woke' — it's just a term they use, half the people can't define it, they don't know what it is." pic.twitter.com/uhZLRADXHa
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 1, 2023
Trump and his niece both hit on a complaint that issues from both sides of the aisle about so-called “wokeness” — the ambiguity surrounding its definition.
Even on the far right, where condescension toward those who are “woke” is the norm, there is little agreement on the meaning of the term, making it both a useful smash-all cudgel and a far less useful tool for crafting legislation to combat it.
And even Trump — who implies the term isn’t useful — has used the “woke” cudgel despite complaining of its inexactitude, telling Fox News that the U.S. military is suffering from the so-called woke virus, as many Republicans put it.
“They’re not learning to fight and protect us from some very bad people,” Trump said at a Town Hall. “They want to go woke, they want to go woke — that’s all they talk about now.”
So many of the GOP candidates — Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, just for starters — are running on the anti-woke platform that its definition, or lack thereof, has become critical to the national debate.
Unlike issues such as who gets taxed, support for NATO and other discernible arguments, the “woke” issue threatens to decide the next election even if, as Trump himself says, “half the people don’t know what it means.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban has recently argued “woke” is good business, with an assertion that most of the world’s great companies are “woke” by the broadest definition — attuned to climate challenges, trying to create a diverse workforce, and looking to serve as broad a customer base as possible, which precludes discrimination.
These initiatives seem like decency to those in Mary Trump’s camp, and like coercion and a threat to meritocracy to the anti-woke campaigners.
Florida Governor and GOP Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis defines woke broadly as a nefarious force creeping in to corrupt, among other things, education, hiring, gender norms and corporate governance. (DeSantis boasts that Florida is the state where “woke goes to die.”)
Mary Trump equates DeSantis’s woke war with an assault on compassion. DeSantis believes it’s a battle against corrupt values. Donald Trump equates it to DeSantis having nothing else to say.
