Easy to feel a bit sick, if I hear it too often. Another headline, another outrage. A sense that the world is being bent out of shape by one man in particular.
I noticed recently that his name is used on radio news and in headlines more often than his predecessors’ names were used in the same context. Can’t prove it, but I’m convinced.
In the past they would have used metonyms such as “the White House wants” or “Washington is calling for”. But now it’s all [NAME] wants, [NAME] says…
What actually motivates this man?
He runs on attention. He needs to be talked about. His name in every conversation, not just in his own country but all over the world. That is the fuel. Without it, he is just another politician.
Which makes you wonder. Is that a strength or a weakness. The political thinker Gene Sharp devoted his life to studying how ordinary people resist power without violence. He came up with the idea of “political ju-jitsu”. In ju-jitsu, you do not meet force with force. You let the other person throw their weight around, and you use their own momentum to throw them off balance.
Their strength becomes the thing that undoes them.
Now apply that logic here. Someone wants to be talked about personally, and he is. He wants his name everywhere, and it is.
So what if we talked about him without ever using his name?
Instead of [NAME] did this or [NAME] said that, try this: ‘the current president of the United States’. It sounds like almost nothing, feels too small to matter. But think about what it actually does.
It denies him the personal recognition he craves. It turns him from a unique personality into a temporary office-holder. It reminds everyone – including him – that this is a role, not a throne. And it shifts the focus from the person to the actions, from the drama to the consequences.
Gene Sharp understood that the smallest acts of resistance can be the hardest to counter because they do not play by the expected rules. This is one of those acts. It costs nothing. You do not need to join anything or sign anything. It is just a choice about language.
I found myself thinking about all of this because I spoke yesterday to Jamila Raqib, who now runs the organisation Gene Sharp founded. I first met her some years ago when Sharp visited the UK and I wrote about his work for the New Statesman. That conversation brought it all back – how the smallest shifts in how we think and speak can matter more than we imagine.
In a culture where attention is power, refusing to give it might be the most effective move there is.