President Trump has often decried the use of the word “affordability,” characterizing it as a “made up” or “fake word made up by the Democrats” to criticize Trump’s economic policies. He has been making that claim for some time, and repeated it recently at the G7 conference in June.
The notion that the Democrats coined a word solely for the purpose of criticizing his policies has numerous advantages for Trump: it both testifies to his importance as a person and satisfies his (and his supporters’) profound and seemingly limitless need to feed their victimization complexes.
But I have to admit that the claim feels bizarre, because I could swear that I heard the word before Mr. Trump’s election in 2024 and even before his election in 2016. But if that were true, then a favorite Trump trope (like that?) would be . . . wrong!
There are a variety of ways to test the proposition that the word pre-dated Trump’s ascendency to the throne–I mean, presidency.
Since I am not being paid very much to research such matters for this blog, I decided to try the simplest method to test the claim. You see, in my day-to-day life, I often find myself communicating by means of words. For instance, I have found words to be invaluable in blogging. Yet, I also am somewhat averse to making usage or spelling errors that might lead someone to question my claimed educational credentials. So to check my use and spelling of various words, I have dictionaries. Yup, good old analog dictionaries printed on paper during a particular year specified in copyright information that can be found somewhere to the front of the volume.
You know where this going. Anyway, I’ll cut to the chase. In my residence, I have a copy of the “American Heritage dictionary [lower case “d”] of the English Language,” third edition, 1992–that is, more than 30 years before the Democrats launched their “affordability” fake-word attack on Trump. That dictionary includes an entry for the word “affordable,” and lists “affordability” as a noun form for the adjective “affordable.” No mention is made there about Trump or the Democrats.
I also have a copy of the 2014 eleventh edition of “Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.” It has an entry for “afford.” It lists “affordability” as a noun form.
Why do I have dictionaries that are so old? Well, they weren’t old when I bought them. And neither was I.
I guess it’s worth adding, for the benefit of Mr. Trump and his followers, that dictionaries typically report current (or past) word usage. Dictionary publishers are generally not in the business of coining new words or predicting future terms that will be concocted by political opponents of Presidents who haven’t been elected yet. Nor is it their practice to solicit word suggestions from Democrats decades in advance of their deployment for use against Donald Trump. Anyway, Democrats are clever (or dumb depending on Trump’s mood), but not that clever.
So this all adds up to the conclusion that Trump’s repeated claims about the provenance of the word “affordability” are wrong, and this chink in the armor of infallibility–an infallibility that I am sure we all believed in–raises questions about other claims he’s made.
For instance, remember when he said that “nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated”? I have it on pretty good authority that Hillary Clinton, for instance, knew all about that very thing long before Trump found it out. And then there’s the whole Iran war thing, which may raise some questions in a few very skeptical minds about Trump’s infallibility. Of course, closer to home on the whole “affordability” thing are Trump’s continual claims that things are actually going great on the economic front.
I hope these findings aren’t too shocking. If you have Trump supporters among your family or friends, I leave it to your discretion about whether you want to share this research. It may be a bit too much for their delicate constitutions. Then again, they probably just won’t believe it. Fake word, fake facts.