On September 30, 2025, the official White House Twitter account tweeted a list of things it claimed the “Democrat Party” wants, including “Crime and lawlessness in our streets,” “Men competing in women’s sports,” and “’Transgender’ for everybody.” Sadly, tweets like this one are par for the course under the current administration, as the White House social media accounts have consistently posted hateful, false, misleading, and straight-up bizarre content since the inauguration.
That there has been so much garbage posted by the Trump administration is hardly worth commenting on. This has arguably been by design: former White House strategist Steve Bannon argued that disorientation is more effective than persuasion, a view summarized in his now infamous quote that “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Whether the Trump-controlled White House is intentionally following this plan or not, it is at least an explanation for the state of the White House Twitter account.
A lot has been said about how to characterize Trump’s method of conveying information, with many portraying him as a bullshitter, in the sense elucidated by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Frankfurt explains the concept by contrasting bullshitters with liars: while both the liar and the bullshitter are involved in misrepresentation of a sort, the liar tries to misrepresent what they believe to be true, while the bullshitter attempts to misrepresent their being interested in the truth at all. In Frankfurt’s words, the bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
That Trump has historically been a prolific bullshitter in this technical sense has been extensively documented. And while there is no indication that Trump is going to stop anytime soon, his second term has been characterized by statements on social media that have become something else entirely. Let’s call it nonsense.
What makes something nonsense as opposed to mere lies or bullshit? Again, we can look at the perpetrator’s relationship to the truth. For example, it is easy to argue with a liar, at least conceptually, because they care about the truth enough to conceal it. By providing them with evidence that they are lying, they then ought to be motivated to revise or retract their statement: they’ve been caught, and need to react to being discovered. It is much more difficult to argue with a bullshitter, though, precisely because they have no interest in getting at the truth: providing them with evidence that they are wrong is unlikely to cause them to retract or revise anything they’ve said.
However, even though the bullshitter does not care about the truth, the content of the bullshit can still be evaluated as being true or false. For example, Trump recently made the claim that he was responsible for saving 100,000 lives as a result of four strikes on boats that he claimed were being used for drug trafficking. This claim is, arguably, bullshit: there is no evidence that supports it, and it is plausible that Trump fabricated it in the moment to justify his actions. While one could point out to Trump that the claim is bullshit, he would likely be unfazed. However, we can still talk about the content of the claim to learn the truth: in this case, the fact that the total number of opioid overdose deaths in the US for all of 2024 was only 82,000, and thus there is no way to save more lives than that by blowing up a handful of boats.
When it comes to nonsense, the nonsense-spouter may also lack interest in truth. But, unlike bullshit, the content of nonsense cannot plausibly be evaluated as true or false.
For example, take one of the statements in the White House’s recent tweets: that the Democrat Party [sic] wants “’Transgender’ for everybody.” Aside from being broadly ungrammatical, the statement is at least recognizably an English sentence. But it is outside of the realm of sense: it has no plausible, singular interpretation. We might try to unpack something with meaningful content: perhaps Trump is claiming that the Democrats want everyone in America to transition, or that they want everyone to list their sex on government-issued IDs as “transgender,” or something equally ridiculous. But these are mere guesses; on the whole, it is not simply a lie or bullshit, it is just nonsense.
It might not sound terribly insightful to look at something nonsensical coming out of the White House and argue that we ought to call it nonsense. However, nonsense serves an important role as part of the “flooding the zone” strategy: since it has no truth-evaluable content, it precludes the possibility of starting discussions about issues that might involve evidence and lead people to the truth, while at the same time still being able to convey messages of fear and hate.
After all, there is still something that gleaned from nonsense, namely sentiment. For instance, when the White House Twitter account puts a big red “X” next to the statement “’Transgender’ for everybody” they are clearly implying that being trans is bad, in some way; that it is a position attributed to the Democrats by the White House again implies that it’s something that the people Trump perceives as enemies is doing; and that it is something that is meant to be “for everybody” implies that it will affect you and people you know. It is a combination of words and symbols that are meant to stir up anger and fear, even if there is no reasonable, meaningful interpretation of the sentence as a whole.
Statements like this are then a kind of opposite to another type of hateful language, the dog whistle. Dog whistles are statements designed to appear innocuous to the majority of people, but whose true intentions are recognizable to a target group, often being used to convey hateful messaging in an inconspicuous way. Trump’s statements, however, are more like a dog barking: loud and obvious to everyone, but with no content aside from conveying a warning. Dog whistles can be called out, dissected, and interpreted to reveal the hateful content that they are hiding, and in this sense, that content can be argued against or shown to be false. But there is no arguing with a bark.
So what should we do when faced with the White House’s nonsense on social media? Reactions online have included confusion, disappointment, and ridicule, all of which are reasonable. But since nonsense aims to distract while precluding the possibility of dialogue, perhaps the best response is to focus our efforts instead on those who want to address important issues in meaningful ways, and not just bark about them.
