Trump's Grammatical Time Machine
The president-elect uses conditional grammar to craft self-fulfilling speculative historical fiction.
If Back to the Future 4 ever becomes a reality, the plot should feature President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Like Marty McFly and Emmett Brown, Trump spent an inordinate amount of time inserting himself in the past, crafting speculative fiction along the way.
In traditional speculative fiction, the author asks the "what if" question. In The Man in the High Castle, Philip Dick asked, "What if the Axis Powers not only won World War II but also occupied the United States?" Stephen King's 11/22/63 asked, "What if somebody killed Lee Harvey Oswald before he could kill JFK?" In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth asked, "What if Charles Lindbergh was president instead of FDR?"
For Trump, one question haunts his fevered dreams: What if he won the 2020 election? To answer this question, Trump relies on a grammatical sleight-of-hand known as conditional structure.
What Condition My Condition Is In
For those unfamiliar with conditional grammar, please bear with this quick, impromptu grammar lesson. A conditional sentence demonstrates a possible situation or consequence, typically introduced with a dependent clause starting with if.
Most conditional sentences—often referred to as zero and first conditionals—strictly articulate facts and plausible outcomes:
Zero conditional: If heated, ice melts.
First conditional: If Republicans win the House of Representatives, they will effectively control all three branches of the federal government.
But there are conditionals reserved for spurious speculation, too. Second conditionals postulate about unreal or improbable situations, while third conditionals ruminate on a revered past that never happened. The former relies on past simple verbs and infinitives, and the latter on past perfect and past participles. Both use the modal verb would in the independent clause.
To better understand the second and third conditionals, a quick examination of Trump's campaign rhetoric provides ample examples.
"If I Was President…"
Historical revisionism fuels Trump's grammatical time machine.
Trump's central campaign hypothesis was as obvious as it was circular: If he had been president when all the bad things happened, the bad things would never have happened in the first place. During a July rally, Trump read off a laundry list of all the bad things he would have stopped before they could happen:
If I was President, the Afghan disaster would have never happened, Ukraine would have never happened, and October 7th attack on Israel would have never happened.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in particular, stuck in Trump's craw:
It would've never happened if I was president. And you know what? It didn't happen. And even radical-left lunatic Democrats say, "I will say, if Trump was president, it wouldn't have happened."
But while in office, Trump never challenged Putin—not once. Whether challenging the annexation of Crimea or his yearslong aggression in the Donbas region, Trump's tough-guy persona never materialized when Putin was in the same room. In fact, before his infamous Helsinki Summit with the Russian leader, Trump expressed his willingness to recognize Putin's encroachment into Ukraine. When asked if the U.S. would accept Russian claims for Crimea, Trump said, "We're going to have to see."
Trump's conditional modals are, at best, ahistorical spitballing. He once hypothesized that his strict immigration policies would have prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001:
I would have been much different. I am extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration. I'm extremely tough on people coming into this country. I believe that if I were running things, I doubt … those people would have been in the country.
Yes, Trump banned travel and revoked visas for tens of thousands of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. However, his travel ban would have missed the mark back in 2001. Trump's "Muslim ban" targeted immigrants from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Meanwhile, the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudia Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon and trained in Afghanistan.
And speaking of Afghanistan, Trump's revision of the "Afghan disaster" does not sync up with the historical record.
Schrödinger Would Have Had a Better Exit Strategy
Campaigning as a dove, Trump set the stage for the United States' exit from Afghanistan with this conditional campaign promise (a rare breed of highly speculative first conditional):
If I become president, the era of nation-building will be ended.
Once elected, however, Trump and his dovish promises caved to his administration's hawkish influences. "My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts," Trump said in his first prime-time address. "I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office." Against his better instincts, Trump deployed 4,000 more American soldiers into Afghanistan in 2017.
Trump turned heads in 2019 when he invited Taliban leaders to Camp David to negotiate a peace deal. The deal, known as the Doha Agreement, entailed American forces releasing more than 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers, including senior leadership, in exchange for the Taliban's promise not to harbor terrorists.
However, the negotiated timeline extended past Trump's first term. Shortly after losing his reelection bid in 2020, Trump ordered a drastic reduction of troops, leaving the remaining 2,500 vastly outnumbered.
This deal set the stage for the impending disaster Trump lamented about. Sen. Marco Rubio—then a prominent critic of Trump, now his loyal nominee for Secretary of State—equated the withdrawal to a "Saigon-type of situation," proclaiming Afghanistan "would fall very quickly and then our ability to conduct operations against terrorist elements in the region could be compromised."
Afghanistan was a game of geopolitical hot potato, and the music stopped when Biden was holding the spud. By the time Biden took office, insurgents already controlled nearly half of Afghanistan's provinces. Trump even admitted that Biden had no control over what happened in Afghanistan. "I started the process," he publicly admitted during a 2021 rally. "They couldn't stop the process." A subsequent National Security Council report reached the same conclusion, claiming Biden was "severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor."
Yet, despite such a predictably fatalistic outcome, Trump asserted he would have—somehow—done it better than Biden. Again, conditional speculation defines his thesis: "We were going to do it with dignity and strength," he told a crowd in Detroit on August 26, 2024. Consistent with his long-term casual and open relationship with policy specifics, Trump didn't elaborate on the finer details of this purported strong, dignified plan.
Trump's "exit" strategy, however, included one dubiously imperial proposal: keeping a military base in Afghanistan. Trump frequently lamented about the loss of the Bagram Airfield, once the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. Had he been in charge then, "We would have never given up Bagram," Trump proclaimed. Nothing says ending the "era of nation-building" like keeping military bases in occupied territory.
Before claiming responsibility for a more favorable yet nonexistent outcome in Afghanistan, Trump must first own his actual contribution to how the exit unraveled. But that's unlikely given how—in the words of Jim Golby, a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security—Trump "neither embraced nor fully repudiated America's mission."
Trump's revisionism—fueled by his grammatical gimmicks and erroneous conditional rhetoric—made Afghanistan the equivalent of Schrödinger's cat: both a heroic victory for him and a politicized tragedy for everybody else.
No More "Ifs" or "Woulds"
Trump has always had a specious relationship with the past. The entire premise of "Make America Great Again" weaponizes nostalgia for a glorious yet nebulous past—all without specifying a precise time, what made the country great, or whom it was great for.
But Trump's fun-filled campaign ride in his grammatical Delorian is over. Come January 20, 2025, the President-elect must forgo ruminating on the past, return to the present, and engage in the unenviable task of governing.
And Trump's second term will test many of his backward-facing, self-fulfilling prophecies. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin fear Trump more than Biden, or will the Russian tyrant stay the course in Ukraine and escalate the war? Will Hamas and Hezbollah pause their planned attacks on Israel, or will these terrorist groups continue launching rockets at their Zionist foes? Will China finally invade Taiwan, or will Trump's tough-on-China bluster keep Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party at bay?
Only time—and possibly Marty McFly and Doc Brown—will tell.
